The Wine documentation has been translated to French by students from the Insa of Rouen.
The credits for the translation go to:
* Wine User Guide Romain CONSEIL Damien GIRAUDEAU Guillaume LEFEBVRE Yvon BENOIST (proofreading) http://fgouget.free.fr/wine/wine-user.html
* Wine FAQ Romuald VIEUX Yvon BENOIST (proofreading) http://fgouget.free.fr/wine/wine-faq.html
* WineLib User Guide José CARRENO Yvon BENOIST (proofreading) http://fgouget.free.fr/wine/winelib-user.html
And believe me, this is a lot of work so they really deserve our kudos. You probably noticed that the Wine Developer's Guide was not translated but that makes sense: if you want to work on Wine it's really best if you speak English anyway.
So what's needed now is to integrate the translation with Wine. This is what I have done by converting the translation to .po format to make it easier to maintain and tweaking the Makefiles accordingly.
The patch is pretty big (even compressed it's more than 200KB) so I did not attach it to this email. Instead I have set up a page on my web site and you can the patch using this URL:
http://fgouget.free.fr/wine/docfr.diff.gz
Here is what the patch does: Add a Makedoc.rules.in file which handles the conversion of SGML files to the final documentation format. Modify documentation/Makefile.in to use Makedoc.rules.in. Add documentation/fr with the po files of the French translation. Use po4a to generate a translated Sgml file from the original sgml documentation and then let Makedoc.rules.in generate the documentation. Detect po4a in configure.ac.
The translation appears to have been made from a snapshot of the documentation taken in the summer of 2004. Now, a bit more than 6 months later, the translation is still more than 90% complete. IMHO this proves that maintaining the translation is quite feasible. If you see any bits of English in the documents above, this is precisely because the translation is not 100% complete anymore: in that case po4a-translate keeps the original version rather than use the outdated translation.
For more information about po4a: http://po4a.alioth.debian.org/
I will upload anything new to the following page: http://fgouget.free.fr/wine/docfr.shtml
Now you pretty much know everything. Let me know if you have concerns, suggestions, etc. I'm hoping we can get this in place soon.