1 · Why I am doing this?
Before you begin your work as a DALnet translator, please try and remember a few things. The translating team does not get paid, we do not get special privileges and this will by NO MEANS guarantee you an O:line nor will you receive a DALnet mailing alias (name@dal.net).
Now, if you find yourself asking "why am I doing this then?", PLEASE save us and yourself the time and find something more interesting to do :). We do not mean to be rude, or mean, but the documentation team requires utter and complete dedication. You should not be doing this expecting anything in return, except your personal gratification in making a difference and perhaps helping some new users have an easier experience on DALnet.
2 · Do not rush
Translating documents is a task that must be done carefully and thoroughly. We will not accept any translations done by automated translating software such as Babelfish and if we find out that this was the method of your translating we will remove the documentations.
3 · Software to be used
3.1 The Editor
The editor is perhaps the most importance software that is used by the translator. The entire translating process (save the parsing, which I will touch on later) is done through this editor. As such, to make sure everyone can read the documents you translate, your editor must be UTF-8 compliant and it must be able to save in a UTF-8 format.
If you do not have such an editor, we have found a perfect editor that seems to work great with all of our documents. It is currently available at http://docs.dal.net/stuff/ur204.exe. Once you have downloaded and installed it, you may begin translating documents.
3.2 Saving documents
When saving documents please make sure to do the following in the save dialog:
1. Rename the file you work on to show it is from your language. For example, file-1.2.3.xml will be filees-1.2.3.xml, where es is a short form for spanish, as en is for english, ru is for russian, etc...
2. Set the charset to UTF-8
3. Set surrogate to ^c~u
4 · Preparing to translate
If you are translating into a new language, you will need to translate the localisation file (found in the templates/ folder in the helpdoc parser). To do this open the english version of the file (or whichever language is easiest for you) and replace everything that needs to be replaced.
4.1 The original file
You can find more information about it here http://docs.dal.net/stuff/original.txt
5 · Translating the documents
All DALnet documents are available publically. If you wish to translate a document, please visit http://docs.dal.net/xml where you will find all the XML versions of our documents. Each document resides in its own folder and within each folder you will find a folder of each language it has been translated into. As well, for ease of verification, we have generated a file located at http://docs.dal.net/filesdone.htm which contains all the files that have been translated to date.
If english is not your strongest language, you may look into any of the other files and translate based on them as they all contain the same information.
5.1 Editing the files
When translating, ask the team leader or expert members about giving yourself a credit. Here is an example of header where you *DO NOT TOUCH*. Please check http://docs.dal.net/stuff/similarity.txt. For more informtion.
6 · The documentation official translators
There are a plenty of translators who helped DALnet with translating its' documents. We recommend you to visit http://docs.dal.net/docstranslators.htm, to see the current official translators and the formers ones.
7 · Credits
- The original text file was written by [Mystro] and Fredfred on 2004-01-04. You can check http://docs.dal.net/fredonly/transwannabe-1.0.0.txt, for the old text file.
- This document was done by h on 2017-04-30.
Please direct any comments or feedback about this document (only! no help requests!) to docs@dal.net. If you need help on issues not covered in this document, please see the information at http://help.dal.net.