Experiences on an Open Source Translation Effort in Japan

As network connectivity becomes more world-wide, the importance of translation efforts among open source software projects has grown rapidly. Many projects, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, already have some teams responsible for translating documents into other languages, but there seems to be few reports in respect to problems, efficiency, and so forth around the projects.

Translation work has several common characteristics and problems that are obviously different from typical software development. This paper describes them through my experiences with FreeBSD Japanese Documentation Project (doc-jp) for last two years, and points out the tasks that are required for such work.