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Translation-Guidelines.md

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Translation guidelines

Below a few notes which we share with publishers who want to translate the book in other languages, but we consider it also helpful for community translations.

  • Names: Ada, Zangemann, Alan must not to be changed. The other names are also mostly references to existing people in computer history or science, but if you want to change them in order to make it easier for children to relate to the characters we should find names which are still common but connected to important figures in the computer history. If you have problems with that, feel free to reach out to Matthias. Please also make sure to just exchange male names with male names, female names with female names to keep the gender balance as intended, or use names which can be male and female.

  • As the book is often used to read it out to children, we highly recommend to test reading it aloud, best also to a few children, to see if the translation works out.

  • The FSFE has a dedicated translation team with volunteer proofreaders for many languages. They can help you as additional proofreaders to make sure special terms are translated correctly, or make recommendations.

  • For the German and the English version the following parts where handwritten by the designer Sandra Brandstätter (if it is a latin language we can ask Sandra if she has time to do that for your language -- if you cover the costs but the Ukrainian and the Arabic translations found similar free fonts):

    • The title and subtitle "Ada & Zangemann - Ein Märchen über Software, Skateboards und Himbeereis"
    • The initials on some of the pages (we can provide them for the Latin alphabet)
    • On page 40-41 there is the demonstration, for the English version we we changed the text for "Ohne Code ist alles doof" ("Don't wreck our tech") and "Sie sind jung + brauchen den Code!" ("They are young + they need the Code!") and pencilled this again. We recommend that your designer exchanges those with the slogans being used in your translation -- else you can also use the English version.
    • The headlines "Danksagung des Autors" + "Über den Author Matthias Kirschner" + "Über die Illustratorin Sandra Brandstätter" + "Webseite zum Buch" + "Lizenz" are handwritten but based on the font "Amatic SC". For the Ukrainian version they found a similar font for that.

  • For the illustrations you can change the following:

    • Page 40+41 - the left banner (two children), right button banner (Ada), and top right (grandma) can be translated, the others are more difficult and we recommend to keep them to also show that it is not just a protest in the local language.
    • Page 32 - "Burp" can stay, or can be changed to local language

  • We would advise to keep the following English text in the illustrations:

    • Page 5 - richest man, can stay in EN (it is in an international magazine)
    • Page 21 - programming, can stay in EN
    • Page 43 - Ring ring, can stay

  • All fonts being used should be under a free cultural font license. E.g. the Open Font License so it is in line with CC-BY-SA of the book.

  • Right to Left (mirror illustrations)

    • Keep all illustrations mirrored (already available in git repo), but make sure that writing still works out (e.g. the "Z" Zangemann logo), except the following ones:
      • Page 5 - magazines
      • Page 21 - programming

  • "Z": In the war against Ukraine the Russian army is using a "Z" sign on military vehicles. The "Z" is quite different to the "Z"-logo of Zangemann, but if you do not have the "Z" in your alphabet and are from the war area, it could still be traumatic. That is why we decided for the Ukrainian version to exchange all "Z"s into the Ukrainian version of "Z". If you have the "Z" in your alphabet or your are not close to this war, you should be fine and readers will not associate the Zangemann logo with the war.

  • It is highly appreciated if the FSFE get two copies. We can use pictures with the book, or also all the different language versions of the book for advertisement of the book.

  • You can reach out to Matthias Kirschner about promotion of the books in those countries, suggestions who could be good to get a quote for marketing, etc.

  • In the acknowledgements of the English version you can change "No Starch Press" to the name of your publisher, as we would like to thank you for publishing this book in your language under a free cultural license, and encourage you to do that for other books in future as well.

Technical details

This repository is set up in a way that scripts can generate multiple output files from the single translation. This allows you as a translator to focus on the translation and let the automation create a transcript for book readings and to output the formatted files for print and digital reading.

It might require some tweaking to get the best possible output from this automation. Your translation is still valuable regardless of how well it works with the rendering. Others from the community can help to run the scripts and tweak it to get nice rendered formats.

To use the automation you can copy the directory structure from one of the other languages and executed the scripts accordingly.

Some hints on how the scripting deals with the translation file:

  • A line break in the source file does not always represent a line break in the Scribus book output.

  • When a line ends with a trailing space it considere a continuation of the same line. So if you to use a line break in your source file for readibility but don't want it to show up in the render, then make sure the line has a trailing space.

  • Explicit line breaks can be inserted by having a line end with two spaces. This is used to controle line wrapping to prevent text over the images on page 19 and 44.

  • Some pages start with a drawn capital letter. This is signified in the source text in brackets, like [A]da. These capital letters are includes as images. Different pages use different colors, so it can be that the letter isn't available in the needed color. In that case the image will have to be created.

  • The source text includes alternative text (alt text) that is added to the images to improve accessibility. This alt text can be recognised by the double bracket syntax. This should work out just fine as long as formatting is maintained.

  • Illustrations are linked from the translation page using symbolic links. So if you want to translate certain images you should create translated images and update the links to point to the translated illustrations.

The scripts are subject to change in order to improve usability and deal with situations encountered for new translations.