2.2.2 How to Submit a Translation as Plain Text

If you feel the procedure described in the previous section is too burdensome and unfeasible for you to follow, you can still submit a translation in plain text. It will be manually converted to PO file by the GNU Web Translation Managers, which can be tricky sometimes, and naturally, means more work for them and slower processing of your request.

You should never translate the HTML markup—i.e. do not use the “View Source” functionality of your browser to translate the raw HTML. Most of it is irrelevant, and automatically inherited from the markup of the original article. Simply save your translation in a plain text file (.txt), preferably in UTF-8 encoding. You can use any decent text editor for that—Emacs, Vim, gEdit, Kate, LibreOffice (the file should be saved as .txt, not .odt), etc.

Translate the title, the main heading and the body of the article up to the footer. For example, for the Free Software Definition that would be:

What is free software? - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation

What is free software?

The Free Software Definition

The free software definition presents…
…
…You can review the complete list of changes to the page through
the cvsweb interface.

Since web-translators do not speak all languages, it is essential to mark somehow any inner markup, because very often it is hard to figure out what translated text should be enclosed inside <em> or <a> elements, to name a few. The easiest way to do this is just to use the corresponding HTML markup, although anything else is suitable. For example, here is how to indicate that the link “History section” at the first paragraph of the same article should correspond to “sección historial” in the translation:

Si quisiera revisar los cambios que hemos hecho, por favor vea la
{sección historial} más abajo para más información.

It is not necessary to include the value of the href attribute, as it is already known.

If you wish your name to appear in the footer as a translator of the article, please also provide a translation of ‘Translation: your name’ or ‘Translated by: your name’, as you prefer. Please also state if you wish your email address to be published (some readers prefer to send suggestions directly to the translator, but we certainly do not require that translators must publish their address).

Finally, send the translation to web-translators@gnu.org, either inline or as an attachment to your message. Once online, please check for any errors or omissions that may have resulted from the conversion process, and report them back.