I am translating the upcoming Sequences ebook to Slovak language. At the moment of writing this, the first of the six parts is fully translated and converted to DocBook, which allows me to export it to PDF, HTML, EPUB and a few other formats. Also, a half of the second part is translated but not converted yet. (For anyone interested, the first part in PDF is available at this temporary link.)
If anyone else is interested in translating the ebook to their language and would like to use the DocBook technology, I would be happy to help: to explain the system, share my scripts and configuration files, provide some tips and best practices about the technology in general and its use for the Sequences; also how to use non-English characters. Actually, I could even coordinate multiple volunteers for your language, so you could just focus on translating one chapter at a time and ignore the big picture. (I have some experience with coordinating translators in an open-source project.) A short introduction: you write each chapter as an XML file (just like in HTML, only with different tags), and the details of converting the XML files to the resulting format are specified separately. You can do a lot of customization, some of it requires merely setting some variables, but you could do anything using XSLT. Installing the whole toolchain on your computer is very easy (at least in Windows); I could send you a ZIP file that you’d simply extract in a directory and everything should work out of the box. (The worst case, if everything fails: you will have to write a simple script to convert the XMLs to some other format you decide to use.)
Why? As a part of attempt to create a rationalist community in my country. I am already translating the web articles (I had the first part of the book mostly covered already), so the book provides me a limited scope for what I was doing anyway. I believe a book has some advantages over blog. One of them: people are used to reading books from the beginning to the end, so you can cross larger inferential distances. With blogs, many people would just read an article or two, and then complain about the text being too long; also the comments are distracting and reading them multiplies the size tenfold.
So the idea is that after translating, I can distribute the PDF files freely, but I can also print a copy or two of the book (each of the six parts would be one physical copy) and lend people the paper version. Assuming they are similar to me, if they read the first chapter and like it, they will be very likely to read it till the end.
DocBook is a really cool set of tools for such cases, did you convert English version to DocBook? I just looked to html on this site and looks like it will take time for parse and convert it to DocBook.
I am translating the upcoming Sequences ebook to Slovak language. At the moment of writing this, the first of the six parts is fully translated and converted to DocBook, which allows me to export it to PDF, HTML, EPUB and a few other formats. Also, a half of the second part is translated but not converted yet. (For anyone interested, the first part in PDF is available at this temporary link.)
If anyone else is interested in translating the ebook to their language and would like to use the DocBook technology, I would be happy to help: to explain the system, share my scripts and configuration files, provide some tips and best practices about the technology in general and its use for the Sequences; also how to use non-English characters. Actually, I could even coordinate multiple volunteers for your language, so you could just focus on translating one chapter at a time and ignore the big picture. (I have some experience with coordinating translators in an open-source project.) A short introduction: you write each chapter as an XML file (just like in HTML, only with different tags), and the details of converting the XML files to the resulting format are specified separately. You can do a lot of customization, some of it requires merely setting some variables, but you could do anything using XSLT. Installing the whole toolchain on your computer is very easy (at least in Windows); I could send you a ZIP file that you’d simply extract in a directory and everything should work out of the box. (The worst case, if everything fails: you will have to write a simple script to convert the XMLs to some other format you decide to use.)
Why? As a part of attempt to create a rationalist community in my country. I am already translating the web articles (I had the first part of the book mostly covered already), so the book provides me a limited scope for what I was doing anyway. I believe a book has some advantages over blog. One of them: people are used to reading books from the beginning to the end, so you can cross larger inferential distances. With blogs, many people would just read an article or two, and then complain about the text being too long; also the comments are distracting and reading them multiplies the size tenfold.
So the idea is that after translating, I can distribute the PDF files freely, but I can also print a copy or two of the book (each of the six parts would be one physical copy) and lend people the paper version. Assuming they are similar to me, if they read the first chapter and like it, they will be very likely to read it till the end.
And, is your DocBook files available somewhere? Github?
DocBook is a really cool set of tools for such cases, did you convert English version to DocBook? I just looked to html on this site and looks like it will take time for parse and convert it to DocBook.