Petter Reinholdtsen

90 percent done with the Norwegian draft translation of Free Culture
2nd August 2013

It has been a while since my last update. Since last summer, I have worked on a Norwegian docbook version of the 2004 book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law. Yesterday, I finally broken the 90% mark, when counting the number of strings to translate. Due to real life constraints, I have not had time to work on it since March, but when the summer broke out, I found time to work on it again. Still lots of work left, but the first draft is nearing completion. I created a graph to show the progress of the translation:

When the first draft is done, the translated text need to be proof read, and the remaining formatting problems with images and SVG drawings need to be fixed. There are probably also some index entries missing that need to be added. This can be done by comparing the index entries listed in the SiSU version of the book, or comparing the English docbook version with the paper version. Last, the colophon page with ISBN numbers etc need to be wrapped up before the release is done. I should also figure out how to get correct Norwegian sorting of the index pages. All docbook tools I have tried so far (xmlto, docbook-xsl, dblatex) get the order of symbols and the special Norwegian letters ÆØÅ wrong.

There is still need for translators and people with docbook knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft translation and proof reading. And I would like the figures to be redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them. Any SVG master around? There are also some legal terms that are unfamiliar to me. If you want to help, please get in touch with me, and check out the project files currently available from github.

If you are curious what the translated book currently look like, the updated PDF and EPUB are published on github. The HTML version is published as well, but github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I saw no point in linking to that version.

Tags: docbook, english, freeculture.

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