[vbox-dev] The documentation translation into Russian

[Klaus Espenlaub]

Hello Serge,

On 2024-01-15 15:38, Сергей Казорин via vbox-dev wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Since VirtualBox is a great state of the art application, we at Alt 
> Linux Team would like to start with a quality translation of the 
> documentation into Russian.

Definitely a challenge which no one has recently tackled (we have 
Russian translations of the manpages but not a single translation of the 
manual itself).

> As far as I see we can just follow steps of the French translator using 
> the same XML-files, or if it is not that simple we would be very pleased 
> to hear from you where should we start.

You can effectively forget what the French translator has done in the 
past: it was too many years ago. The last update was in July 2014. We 
have removed the French translation completely a while ago because it 
was too outdated to be useful (tried contacting the volunteer but never 
received any response).

The need to start from scratch is true for another reason: With 
VirtualBox 7.0 the official documentation was changed into DITA format 
(the VirtualBox source code contains a slightly aged DocBook variant), 
and with VirtualBox 7.1 DITA is also used in the VirtualBox source.

So you need to find a sensible translation workflow for documentation in 
DITA format - which might benefit somewhat from the smaller chunks of 
information but might need different tools to be reasonably productive 
with keeping the translation up to date.

Note that the manpages will remain in DocBook format (what DITA offers 
in this area is very poor, and we came up with our own converter for 
this specific use case). Not that there is much work expected in this 
area, just when new CLI features are added and the manpage content is 
improved.

Oh, and a final bit: since translating the documentation is a very 
significant contribution I'd encourage you to go for the Oracle 
Contributor Agreement to avoid any ambiguity...

Best,
Klaus

> 
> Sincerely yours,