The GNOME 2.12 press release and release notes are ready for translation. Hopefully we'll have even more translations than we had for 2.10. I already know that we have support several more languages in the software itself.

Luis Villa did a very sensible reorganisation of the release notes and Davyd Madeley made his usual pretty screenshots. Thanks to Telsa for proof-reading, and thanks to marketing-list for the ideas.

The release notes were a bit rushed, due to lack of time, and after doing this 4 or 5 times, I'm becoming tired of writing the same sentence structures repeatedly. It's time for someone else to take over and shake it up, so I'm declaring now that I'm not doing it next time. I've already documented what needs to be done and when to do it, though you've really got to stick to the schedule, so that translators have time. I will try really hard not to get in the way whenever I see some dodgy grammar, amateurish phrase, or obvious reaching. We can afford small mistakes like that, and the review phase should catch all that anyway.

xml2po is so good

For translations we are using Danilo's xml2po again, with the source in DocBook, but this time it's all built into the web site build system, so we don't need to manually generate the translated HTML and manually copy it across. I'm also using this for the not-ready-yet GNOME tour. This is such a great system, which solves a problem that all translated web sites have – The translations become out of date as soon as the original changes, because there's no way for the translators to see exactly what's changed, so users read the original because they don't trust the translation. There must be lots of web site systems (CMSs, etc) which store the content in XML. They should integrate xml2po immediately.

xml2po is also being used now for GNOME's user documentation. We hope that the English text will get more attention as a side-effect of all those translators looking at it. Hopefully that will make documentation more fun, and less work, for Shaun.