[Po4a-dev]Re: French translation of GNU software manuals

[Karl Eichwalder]

Arnaud Gomes-do-Vale <address@hidden> writes:

> I have looked at the KDE translation project, I really don't like the
> way they use po. Specifically, I don't like the need to add a comment
> (or virtual paragraph or whatever) in the original document when a
> translator wants to add a paragraph in his translation. And I think
> this is a misfeature in po itself, which cannot be easily
> circumvented.

The easiest solution would be to add this info to the original text,
too.  Maybe, it's even useful within the English text, if it isn't, oen
can put it into an ifdef'ed environment.  Using XML something like this
could work:

    <para only_for="fr">Text for fr.</para>

Using SGML one would go for marked sections:

    <![ %fr; [
    <para>Text for fr.</para>
    ]>

I'm pretty sure, texi has something similar to offer.

> I know po has advantages, but what I am pointing out is that it has
> major drawbacks (yes, I think this stuff with virtual paragraphs is a
> *major* drawback). And I really don't want to use it as long as
> translating a document is more difficult with po than without. Read:
> as long as changing anything in the translation requires mailing the
> original author and waiting for his acknowledgement and his modified
> document.

I think, communication with the original author isn't that bad.
Getting work done, is important, but human understanding is even more
important.

BTW, I don't think one way to handle the translation business does not
mean we have to handle all the other translations the same way.  We must
not forget to work out a scheme to provide updated manuals reliably; if
it isn't possible to update the docs, the whole project will suffer a
lot.

I think it's also reasonable to translate a document intially straight
away.  But than we need a so called alignment tool that's able to
combine original and translation paragraph by paragraph and turn the
result into a .po file like structure.

-- 
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