Lübbe Onken wrote:
> I was also thinking about ways to improve the translation of the
> docs. I have to admit, that I'm hanging behind with the German docs,
> because it's not easy to spot sections that need translation.
That worries me too. It is very easy to miss out entire paragraphs.
Also, the structure of the German docs is diverging from the English.
Every so often Lübbe pulls it back into line, but the whole process is
inherently error-prone.
> I see two possible options:
>
> 1) We could go the GIMP way, split up the docs into lots of smaller
> sections which contain all languages.
I think that will be difficult to read. I am not quite sure how this
will work, but if you have to skip over
German/French/Dutch/Spanish/Bulgarian to get to Lithuanian it becomes
harder to compare paragraphs, and just as easy to miss something.
> 2) We could go the KDE way and split up the English documentation
> into po files, which we then translate and merge back into Language X.
> + Structure will automatically be consistent.
> + Reference Ids (Xref) will automatically be consistent.
> + Easy spotting of untranslated sections (poEdit), Translation status
> on Web page.
> + no changes to the english docs necessary.
> + easy to create Docs in another Language.
> + Fallback to english is automatically given if a section isn't
> translated.
That's a lot of plusses. I especially like point 4 ;-)
> - lot of work to get the first (German) translation up and running
> again.
> - (just a guess) translators work out of context, because they only
> see single paragraphs and not the entire section at a time.
It is a problem, but if we can provide the nightly html output easily on
Berlios, then you only have to wait one day to see the full context, and
the docs don't generally change very fast anyway.
> If we are going to change anything, my clear favourite is option 2. I
> just want to remind everyone of the boost in UI languages we got,
> since we simplified the translation.
We do seem to have a lot of willing translators out there - thanks guys.
Translating the doc is a huge task, but it seems that (unlike the
current system) you could do it one chapter/paragraph at a time, with
the rest reverting to english.
If we do that, we _must_ make sure that the english is squeaky clean
before we start. Any changes to the structure, line wrapping, xml tags,
etc. will throw up lots of fuzzy translations. It would be a good idea
to review hacking.txt as well so we can agree on which xml tags we want
to use for what, as it is not entirely consistent.
Simon
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Received on Mon Mar 21 11:39:03 2005