A community effort has started to translate "The Definitive Guide To Symfony", the official symfony documentation, into various languages. Given the very liberal license of the book (GFDL), there is no legal difficulty in publishing a translation, as long as the translation is also published under the GFDL license and cites its origin.

To give more visibility to these translations and leverage the effort, we've just integrated the available translations to the official documentation pages. When a page is translated in the wiki, the English version shows a link to it in the sidebar, and a table of contents is available for each language. You can check the Chinese translation for a better idea of the integration.

Of course, the process of retrieving the translation from the wiki and publishing it in the documentation pages is automated, and wiki translations need to respect a few conventions. Translated chapters need to have an URL formatted that way:

http://trac.symfony-project.com/trac/wiki/Documentation/[language_code]/book/1.0/[chapter_name]

The language code must be an international culture code (like fr_FR for France), and the chapter name must be the English name prefixed with the chapter number, exactly as it appears in the original documentation (like 02-Exploring-Symfony-s-Code for Chapter 2). All translations not respecting this convention are ignored.

In addition, the markup used for the text must be Markdown, and be included in a WikiMarkdown processor, as follows:

{{{
#!WikiMarkdown 
[Chapter title]
=============

[Chapter contents, in Markdown]
}}}

Take example on the existing translations that made it to the documentation page (for instance the Chinese translation).

If you already translated a chapter but it doesn't appear in the documentation section, there might be a problem with the page title or code. Modify it according to the rules above, wait a day, and check again if our nightly batch has updated the documentation pages with your translation.

We hope that the easier access to the translations will improve both the adoption of symfony in non-English speaking countries and the ongoing translations efforts by a few volunteers that already did a great job.

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