Just took a brief pass over chapter 4 and tweaked spelling/grammar...

[alexdowad]

There are still a number of places left where the grammar, diction, etc. is a bit awkward. In some cases I'd like to compare with the Japanese original to be sure that I don't change the meaning while trying to make it read smoother, but I don't have any more time for that today.

[alexdowad]

Wow, I've never seen "you can merge this pull request automatically" on GitHub before... does this mean I have push rights for this repo?

[markburns]

Yeah - I added you to the organisation. I think it's better to trust people first (obviously within reason).
You don't need your fork, but if you can do work on feature branches and do pull requests then that would be good.

That way people can comment as work is progressing. Also probably best to have someone else do the actual merge, otherwise you might as well push straight to master. Although so far there's just the two of us.

Hopefully, it'll be like "If you build it, they will come", and we'll get loads of help and finish it quickly.

[alexdowad]

What kind of things do you think would be appropriate to use feature branches for on this project?

[markburns]

Yeah it's a good point. Maybe not. I'm used to thinking about code.
I suppose we could just push to master and keep an eye on changes and review commits.

Pull requests represent a unit of work, but in translations I guess it doesn't make as much sense.

By the way, I was thinking about this problem earlier:

There's a service https://phraseapp.com/ that looks good for in place editing using the I18n library in a Rails app.

I was just thinking about editing the script that is used to auto-generate the textile files from the original Japanese HTML to output numbered paragraphs somehow and convert instead into HAML or ERB. Then saving internationalised in YAML.

%div= I18n.t(:chapter_1_paragraph_1)

chapter_1_paragraph_1: 日本語はここです

etc.

That way we could get a Rails app running and do in place editing. My guess is that the trade-off for development time vs easing translation and lowering barrier to entry for people helping out would be worth it.

[alexdowad]

@markburns, if you want to come up with a specialized Rails app for editing translations, that is fine, but for me, simple and stupid is good enough: keep the untranslated bits in Japanese, type English translation directly above or below the original text, then delete the original text once you have translated a whole paragraph. For proofreading, use split windows so you can see the original/translation next to each other.

[markburns]

Was thinking maybe to convince others to help out. Plus it's something that could be re-used, perhaps for other tech books in the future. I don't think the app itself would need to be all that complex. (Famous last words)

[alexdowad]

OK. More power to you!