More translations of the Advent Calendar

The response to the 2009 advent calendar has been amazing so far. One frequently asked question since then has been the need for more translations. Some people commented on my previous post about helping with the Polish and Portuguese translations, and some others sent me an email directly about the same topic.

But for obvious reasons, the "More with symfony" book is not yet available in the symfony repository, and as such, the translation in other languages cannot be finished before Christmas. Also, the advent calendar is not available in the repository neither for technical reasons. The symfony documentation will only host the final book which has a slightly different table of contents as the chapters are not splat into several parts (the book has "only" 15 chapters). For all these reasons, even the most motivated translators lack the infrastructure to do their jobs well... until now.

If you want to translate the "More with symfony" book in your language, here is what you need to do:

• Be motivated: Translating 320 pages is huge amount of work, especially when you are not a professional translator (on average, you will need 2 to 4 hours to translate a chapter). So you definitely need some help. Start by looking for at least 3-4 motivated people willing to help with the translation (you can subscribe to the symfony doc mailing-list, and talk about your plan on the symfony user mailing-list). You need to find both translators and proof-readers.

• Ask access to the repository: Write me (fabien.potencier [[at]] symfony-project.org) an email with the language you want to translate the book to, the full names, emails, and trac usernames of the team (more people will be able to join later on of course). You will then receive full instructions about how to translate the book, and where to commit your translations.

• Begin the translation: Half-translated tutorials/books are less valuable. So, you must know that the book will only be made available when the whole translation is finished and proof-read.

• Be Committed: Translating a book is not a one-shot effort. The English book will evolve in the coming months. Based on our readers feedback, we will fix typos, fix bugs in code examples, tweak the most obscure paragraphs, and some more. The best translation teams are committed to update the book on a regular basis to keep it up to date with the English version (The Italian, Spanish, and Japanese translation teams are a perfect example of such a great commitment).

Some practical notes about the translations:

• You will obviously have access to the remaining chapters before they are published on the symfony website.

• All translated chapters, as for the original ones, will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

• The book will be made available as a printed book like the English one.

• Each translator will have about 100 words to talk about himself in the "About the Authors" section of the printed book. You will become famous!

• All translators will receive a "free" printed book.

There is more than one way to contribute to an Open-Source project. You can write code, you can help people on the mailing-list, you can spread the word on your blog and forums, you can talk at conferences, you can write some tutorials, and of course, you can help translating the existing documentation.

That's a unique occasion for local symfony communities to speak out. I would love to turn over the pages of the Portuguese, German, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, or Russian version of the "More with symfony" book. Remember, I love books, I want more of them!