Wednesday, March 19, 2003

Fun With Languages

so a few people have started work on translating the subversion book into japanese and chinese.

this is exactly why it's insanely cool that o'reilly is letting ben, mike, and fitz do the book as an open source project. with a sufficiently interesting project (and subversion definately qualifies), people just come out of the woodwork and start working on it. as a result people who speak japanese and chinese (well, traditional chinese anyway, for now) will be able to read the book and use the software. plus, if o'reilly ever decides to publish a version of the book in japanese or chinese, they've got a good head start on the work of translating it. everyone benefits.

now we just have to figure out how to keep them interested enough to keep their translations up to date, so it doesn't go the way of the french translation of the original subversion handbook (before the docbook conversion and expansion of it into a real book)...