Hi,

Welcome to the Fedora Translation Project. I would like to outline some of the basic steps as follows for you to get started:

To become a translator, you first need to sign up an account on
http://rhlinux.redhat.com/cgi-bin/i18n-signup/

The steps to generate ssh key pair need by the sign up process are:

* Open a terminal window
* [username@host homedirectory]$ cd .ssh
* [username@host .ssh]$ ls
* If you see "id_dsa" and "id_dsa.pub", you can skip the following steps. However, you must remember the password you have used to generate the keys.
* If you do not see the above two files, do the following:
* [username@host .ssh]$ ssh-keygen -t dsa
* You will be requested to enter your password twice to generate the key pair.
* Once the keys are generated, copy the "id_dsa.pub" content and paste it into the account sign up page. (you can use "cat id_dsa.pub" to display the key content.)

Once you have submitted account request, and got it approved, you can start to check out the modules.

The CVSROOT for the software translation module is ":ext:username@i18n.redhat.com:/usr/local/CVS". You can add aliases in your ~/.bashrc file to make life easier. The alias name can be changed using your own preference. And don't forget to substitute the "username" with your user name. eg:

alias cvs-software='export CVSROOT=:ext:username@i18n.redhat.com:/usr/local/CVS'

Now, you are ready to check out modules. The module name for software po files is "translate". e.g.

[username@host homedirectory]$ cvs-software
[username@host homedirectory]$ cvs -z9 co translate

You should be able to find all software package names under ~/translate/ directory. Under each package, there are a number of po files such as "de.po" or "zh_TW.po". The name represents the language code.

For the moment, all of the software translation are up2date except for the huge specspo package (1179 untranslated out of 2746 msgs). If you are keen to make this file fully translated, please claim your intended part (eg, #245 ~ #300) to this mailing list and start your translation. By doing this, the possible version conflict can be avoided. Once you have done your part, you can commit the file as you like. If you are interested in proofreading the software translation for Fedora, you can also claim the packages that you want to proofread and make the changes as you see fit against your proofreading file. Most important of all, once someone has claimed their intended part/file, others please don't touch the part/file to avoid the conflict. In other words, all of us have to coordinate with each other to produce an efficient workflow.

Thanks again for your participation & contribution to make a better Fedora Project. I am so pleased to see people like you guys to join us because I know myself is not sufficient to make this TC localization project as good as it should be. Please don't hesitate to ask any questions that you may have regarding to this project.

Regards,
Ben
-- 
Ben Wu
Technical Translator / Support Engineer
Red Hat APAC		+61 7 3514 8111
Disclaimer: http://apac.redhat.com/disclaimer