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

[Arnaud Gomes-do-Vale]

Karl Eichwalder <address@hidden> writes:

> 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 don't know about texinfo itself, but at the worst I think it can be
done in TeX. However, I am not sure it is as easy as with XML.

BTW, this could allow to store the translation in the same source
file(s) as the original. In XML, this would be something along the
lines of:

<section>
 <title lang="en">My title</title>
 <title lang="fr">Mon titre</title>

 <para>
  <text lang="en">
   My text.
  </text>
  <text lang="fr">
   Mon texte.
  </text>
 </para>

 <para>
  <text lang="en">
   This is an untranslated paragraph.
  </text>
 </para>

 <para>
  <text lang="fr">
   Ce paragraphe est spécifique à la version française.
  </text>
 </para>

</section>

Probably not useful for long manuals (this would quickly become a
nightmare, with conflicting patches if several translators work on
several languages at the same time -- in this case, gettext is
better), but it could be nice for shorter documents that don't change
often.

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

Yes. It is just not necessarily practical. I mean, keeping in touch
with the author, sending him feedback and keeping him informed of your
changes is important, but I think a translator should not have to
bother the author just to "please add this magic comment stuff here".

> 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.

Yes, that would be a good tool. Quite difficult to do, I think,
precisely because paragraphs can be added (or in some cases removed)
in the translation.

-- 
Arnaud