<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">I just saw Chris Lattners tweet about the translation section of the <a href="https://swift.org/documentation/" class="">Swift Documentation page</a>.<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The idea to encourage community driven translations into other languages is great.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">But getting multiple people to collaborate on a single translation language requires some sort of collaboration platform.</div><div class="">For the Chinese translation this is GitHub. It’s only natural to follow this example for other languages. We’re developers after all and GitHub is where the rest of the Swift project is hosted.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I’d recommend pushing the English ebook to GitHub as well.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Think about future releases of Swift. As the language evolves, so will the book. </div><div class="">The only way the maintainer of a translation can accommodate these changes, is if he knows what they are. </div><div class="">For a German translation, I’d include a file with the latest commit hash (or submodule reference) of the english book repo that my translation is based on. </div><div class="">Then when the English version is updated, all I need to do is to diff its current master against the commit hash. This will allow me to see if any of the changes are relevant to my translation.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">When there is a git repo for the base language that can be forked as a starting point, this also encourages people to keep the original structure intact. Translations would also result in an epub file with the same style and format as the original. This would give them a more uniform look and allows for a central list that offers epub downloads for the various languages. People could also more easily jump between the english and their native language version of the book.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">A benefit on the side: Why not accept community contributions on the English version of the book as well?</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><div class="">However, using git is not the only thing to take away from the Chinese translation project:</div><div class="">They converted everything to Markdown. Having a format that is easy to edit directly, and more importantly <i class="">very</i> <i class="">easy</i> to diff, is key to making community-based translations a success.</div><div class="">ePubs just being a zip file of html files are not a bad format, but something like Pandoc (<a href="http://pandoc.org/epub.html" class="">http://pandoc.org/epub.html</a>) would be better in my opinion.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">What tool did Apple use internally to make the book? Do you have any other source files that you could provide?</div></div><div class="">Otherwise, just dumping the unzipped epub to GitHub would already help a lot.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Cheers,</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Tim</div></body></html>