Japanese style guide for product docs: maintenance and decisions
Purpose
This issue serves as a central record for Japanese style guide maintenance, updates, and decision-making. All discussions related to style guide improvements are tracked here to provide context and history for the team.
Original Goal
The issue tracks the development of a concise and practical Japanese style guide to be used specifically for the localization of GitLab technical documentation.
The current situation is, we have (1) a Japanese style guide created for marketing content: issue-tracker#16 (closed) and (2) GitLab's English technical documentation style guide https://docs.gitlab.com/development/documentation/styleguide/
The goal is to synthesize relevant guidance from existing style guides, incorporate patterns from existing Japanese translations (such as, CreationLine docs https://gitlab-docs.creationline.com/, or GitLab blog posts https://about.gitlab.com/ja-jp/blog/), and create a streamlined resource that translators can effectively use during the documentation localization project.
This style guide should be critical and focused, growing organically, containing only elements that truly add value to the translation process, and only relevant examples, rather than being a comprehensive resource that's created for the sake of completeness.
Additional Considerations
- Need to work with @nakiyama-ext and @emikimura-ext to validate the style guide.
- Worth exploring opportunities for style guide automation similar to Vale tests used by the Technical Writing team. Consider this experiment: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/office-of-the-ceo/ai-at-gitlab/ai-at-gitlab-usecases/-/issues/60+
- Worth leveraging Microsoft style guide (but not in entirety; only what specifically applies to JA translation of GitLab tech docs): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/reference/microsoft-style-guides