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Date:      Sun, 15 Jul 2001 13:01:30 -0700
From:      Jordan Hubbard <jkh@freebsd.org>
To:        dima@unixfreak.org
Cc:        doc@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Stale translations
Message-ID:  <20010715130130F.jkh@freebsd.org>
In-Reply-To: <20010715134208.9F7513E2F@bazooka.unixfreak.org>
References:  <20010715134208.9F7513E2F@bazooka.unixfreak.org>

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From: Dima Dorfman <dima@unixfreak.org>
Subject: Stale translations
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 06:42:08 -0700

> This has probably been brought up before, but I can't find anything in
> the archives: what do we do about stale translations?  For certain
> things, no documentation is better than old, outdated, misleading
> documentation.  Practices and procedures change, and it's better to
> have somebody ask someone about it instead of being misled by an
> outdated document.

I don't think we really have any "standard practice" for this yet,
actually, since you're the first to raise it seriously.  That makes
the issue yours now, sorry. ;-)

> So, what can we do about them?  We can obviously remove them; the
> original translators probably won't like this, but we can always bring
> them back if somebody wants to work on them.  Another alternative
> would be to post a big warning on the front of each document saying
> it's so obsolete as to be nearly useless (we'd need to find somebody
> who speaks the language, which may not be easy).  Anything else?

I think you need to try and contact the authors to see what they want
done - in many cases, this will be sufficient to generate a burst of
updating effort which is, of course, the most desirable fix.

If a month or two elapses (long enough to cover the length of a
typical European vacation ;) without any response, you might deem that
equivalent to the "I have no interest in maintaining this translation,
please kill it" response, in which case it would probably then be
prudent to post a *MAJOR* 'heads up' message to -doc and possibly even
-announce which spells out the impending death of the Foo language
translation.  At that point, one of two things will happen:  Some
speaker of foo will emerge going "No!  No!  I'll take it!" or you'll
get no response at all, clearly showing you the next move to
take.

- Jordan

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