Translating Seam into your own language

This page contains the instructions for translating the community Seam documentation into your own native language.

The first step, is to find your language in the following table:

If your language does not appear in the above table, then please raise a feature request in JIRA describing which language and locale you would like to translate Seam into. Our documentation team will then create the necessary directory structure in Seam SVN to contain the translation in your own language.

The next step, is to check out the .po files for your language from the Seam SVN repository. These files are stored in SVN under their individual language directories (based on the language-locale code in the above table). You can feed the following URL into an SVN client to check out the entire reference guide or you can navigate to the URL in your browser to select the link for a specific locale:

http://anonsvn.jboss.org/repos/seam/branches/community/Seam_2_3/seam-reference-guide/

Each chapter of the documentation is represented by a separate .po (Gettext) file. We recommend the use of a PO file editor such as KBabel (if you're running KDE) or POEdit for translating the text contained within the .po files. These tools allow you to work with a paragraph at a time, by displaying the source text (in US-English) and allowing you to enter the corresponding translated text for the same paragraph. Both versions (English, and the translated version) are contained within the .po file.

To build your translations, you must have the poxml program installed. Once you have the program installed, just run in seam-reference-guide submodule:

mvn clean package -Dbuild.translations

You'll then find the translated html and pdf next to the en-US docs in doc/reference/{language}-{country}.

Our documentation team will synchronize any documentation changes made to the source version of the documentation (en-US) which will flag any modified paragraphs as fuzzy (meaning they may require an updated translation) regularly.

Please contribute the translation it to us as a patch (in unified diff format) via JIRA and we will include it in Seam. It's up to you how much of the documentation you translate - but we ask that you translate at a minimum one chapter. You can contribute your translation as you proceed if you wish - just keep the JIRA issue open and update it as you go.

Releasing translated documentation

As the Seam documentation is worked up until the last minute for a release, translations from English may not be released immediately. The process for releasing translations is:

1. Seam X.Y.Z.GA is released with the English docs as prepared by the Seam development team.
2. If a translation needs updates, the documentation from that release will be branched in SVN into branches/doc and the translation committed.
3. Once the documentation is verified complete we will release a special jboss-seam-docs-X.Y.Z.zip just containing the documentation and translation. The documentation available from http://docs.jboss.org will be updated.
4. Any changes made to a docs branch must be merged into the main branch as well.