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Dear all:

I like POV-Ray and I think it's a good software to be introduced in my
home country. But language is a problem for ordinary Chinese people, I
want to translate all the POV-Ray user-tutorial and user-reference into
Chinese to help people get into this perfect software with less
difficulties. I checked the license, there is no separated license for
its documents' distribution. So I think it may follow that of the code
as well. Since it's POV-Ray license but not GPL, I read it and found it
"prohibit the derive from source code". I am confused if translation of
the document is some kind of derivation too. Could anybody answer me
this question? Thanks!

- --
Zhenqing LI
Materials Science & Engineering (Emphasis on Polymer)
Room 161, Sirrine Hall
School of Material Science & Engineering, Clemson University
Clemson, SC 29634, U.S.A
Tel: 864-656-0888(Office)
E-mail: zhe### [at] clemsonedu
Homepage: http://people.clemson.edu/~zhenqil
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> I like POV-Ray and I think it's a good software to be introduced in my
> home country. But language is a problem for ordinary Chinese people, I
> want to translate all the POV-Ray user-tutorial and user-reference into
> Chinese to help people get into this perfect software with less
> difficulties. I checked the license, there is no separated license for
> its documents' distribution. So I think it may follow that of the code
> as well. Since it's POV-Ray license but not GPL, I read it and found it
> "prohibit the derive from source code". I am confused if translation of
> the document is some kind of derivation too. Could anybody answer me
> this question? Thanks!

It has already been translated to Spanish, and nobody complained about 
it... :)

You could use the povray.international newsgroup to coordinate the 
translations.

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Zhenqing Li nous apporta ses lumieres en ce 2007/11/09 13:39:
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> 
> Dear all:
> 
> I like POV-Ray and I think it's a good software to be introduced in my
> home country. But language is a problem for ordinary Chinese people, I
> want to translate all the POV-Ray user-tutorial and user-reference into
> Chinese to help people get into this perfect software with less
> difficulties. I checked the license, there is no separated license for
> its documents' distribution. So I think it may follow that of the code
> as well. Since it's POV-Ray license but not GPL, I read it and found it
> "prohibit the derive from source code". I am confused if translation of
> the document is some kind of derivation too. Could anybody answer me
> this question? Thanks!
> 
> - --
> Zhenqing LI
I don't think that a translation of the documentation will cause problems. In my 
eyes, a translation is not a derivative work. It's the same work made available 
to peoples who can't read the original language.

-- 
Alain
-------------------------------------------------
f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgrmmng.

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Alain <ele### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> I don't think that a translation of the documentation will cause problems. In my 
> eyes, a translation is not a derivative work. It's the same work made available 
> to peoples who can't read the original language.

  Actually international copyright laws also protect translations made of
copyrighted works. However, I don't think the team minds.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp nous apporta ses lumieres en ce 2007/11/09 18:19:
> Alain <ele### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
>> I don't think that a translation of the documentation will cause problems. In my 
>> eyes, a translation is not a derivative work. It's the same work made available 
>> to peoples who can't read the original language.
> 
>   Actually international copyright laws also protect translations made of
> copyrighted works. However, I don't think the team minds.
> 
Ask for permision first. If nobody have an objection, or you have the 
benediction of the author, then you can proceed.

-- 
Alain
-------------------------------------------------
If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.

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Alain wrote:
> Warp nous apporta ses lumieres en ce 2007/11/09 18:19:
>> Alain <ele### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
>>> I don't think that a translation of the documentation will cause
>>> problems. In my eyes, a translation is not a derivative work. It's
>>> the same work made available to peoples who can't read the original
>>> language.
>>
>>   Actually international copyright laws also protect translations made of
>> copyrighted works. However, I don't think the team minds.
>>
> Ask for permision first. If nobody have an objection, or you have the
> benediction of the author, then you can proceed.
> 
Thank you guys! I will get into it right now. :)

Zhenqing

- --
Zhenqing LI
Materials Science & Engineering (Emphasis on Polymer)
Room 161, Sirrine Hall
School of Material Science & Engineering, Clemson University
Clemson, SC 29634, U.S.A
Tel: 864-656-0888(Office)
E-mail: zhe### [at] clemsonedu
Homepage: http://people.clemson.edu/~zhenqil
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Zhenqing Li wrote:
> Thank you guys! I will get into it right now. :)

Perhaps you can answer a question for me ...

Is the fact that the POv-Ray SDL requires the use of Latin characters (and is
basically an English-language script) a barrier to its use by cultures that
use non-Latin character sets?

Put another way, while someone not familiar with English could conceivably
learn to use the SDL by learning the keywords by rote, if they were not
trained in the use of ASCII-style data input, would they be unable to code in
POV-Ray SDL?

-- Chris

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> Put another way, while someone not familiar with English could conceivably
> learn to use the SDL by learning the keywords by rote, if they were not
> trained in the use of ASCII-style data input, would they be unable to 
> code in POV-Ray SDL?

The hurdle is bigger, but can't be avoided completely. Localizing
language keywords is not a good idea, and you wouldn't dream of
doing it with languages like C or Java. However, in my experience,
people in Asia will be very happy when they can have comments,
file names and GUI texts in their native language. I never
looked in the sources, but I suspect POVRay is currently
using ISO-8559-1 latin encoding and 8-bit characters for
all strings in which case all of the above would fail.

Working with arbitrary non-english text is not so intimidating
as as long as you know what you may no longer take for granted.
Here is a friendly introduction to the topic:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

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Christian Froeschlin wrote:
> people in Asia will be very happy when they can have comments,
> file names and GUI texts in their native language. I never
> looked in the sources, but I suspect POVRay is currently
> using ISO-8559-1 latin encoding and 8-bit characters for
> all strings in which case all of the above would fail.

Wrong :-) <http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/3.6.1/263/>

Of course, what the text editors can handle is a different story...

	Thorsten

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> Wrong :-) <http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/3.6.1/263/>

Clap clap! Great! I didn't say anything ;) What about the Windows GUI?

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