Henrius, I appreciate all the time and energies you have put on this and, believe me, it hasn't been easy to decide. I can't disagree with most of your comments since, as I tried to explain before, I think Midgard the tool and Midgard the developers are capable of matching the requirements. But there were other factors in this tight final. Just one comment: On Mon, 2006-10-30 at 13:45 +0200, Henri Bergius wrote:
I think only i18n req we don't support is PO import/export of content. And to be frank, I'm sceptical that content translators would like to work using that anyway.
I was skeptical too, and it was just last Friday when I asked yet again, this time in #i18n at irc.gnome.org. The edited log is below but the main conclusion is that yes, they want to work with their tools using xml2po and a versioning system. They are serious about it. The log: (...) (03:21:35 PM) qgil: also, I guess the tool we need to look at is http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/damned-lies/ , isn't it danilo ? (03:22:05 PM) danilo: not really, damned-lies currently just uses xml2po (03:22:15 PM) danilo: so, if xml2po can extract the content, then it's not a problem (03:22:35 PM) danilo: qgil: any translator who has ever used xml2po so far should be able to help (03:22:58 PM) danilo: qgil: if you want to test it yourself, take a snippet of valid XML, and run "xml2po -a yourfile.xml" (03:23:24 PM) danilo: if it gets into msgid "blahblah" all the stuff that needs translation, then that XML format will do just fine (03:23:40 PM) qgil: no, I don't want to test anything relating to translations, I want the i18n saying "yes, this is what we need" or "no, this sucks" - I have enough with the wgo revamp :) (03:24:03 PM) danilo: qgil: well, ok, then just point me at XML format you're considering, and I can say "yes" or "no" :) (03:24:13 PM) qgil: good :) (03:25:28 PM) danilo: and just to be clear: ideally, you would use our existing documentation infrastructure instead (such as gnome-doc-utils), but we are already meeting you half-way, since we are aware that it's going to be hard to meet our requirements even partially :) (...) (03:39:02 PM) danilo: qgil: basically, we want translators to be able to fetch updated PO files from something like http://progress.gnome.org/module/epiphany (look at the "user manual") (03:39:21 PM) danilo: qgil: and they should be able to simply upload those PO files and have them merged (03:39:52 PM) danilo: with "upload" best being "cvs commit" (or svn once we switch to it), but any other method will do (03:40:27 PM) qgil: danilo: I still don't understand how web content can be treated in the same way as software strings, though (03:41:27 PM) josep: qgil: look at how documentation is translated, it should be pretty similar, I think (03:41:28 PM) danilo: qgil: well, it's quite simple: any content can be divided into paragraphs (or sentences), and a single paragraph is easier to maintain translation for (03:42:26 PM) danilo: qgil: as a matter of fact, other approaches bring results we had with documentation for the past 4 years: no documentation has been translated to any language except for Sun contributed translations, and they were too hard to update because we only had docbook source on them (03:42:48 PM) danilo: so, basically, we had to dump almost all of sun contributed translations (03:43:48 PM) danilo: qgil: it will all seem clear to you when you just realize that you want to translate small snippets instead of entire documents; i.e. you don't want to translate markup which stays the same, etc. (03:44:05 PM) danilo: qgil: and that's what xml2po tries very hard to help translators with (03:44:38 PM) qgil: I perfectly understand the need to have a process friendly to your process to get wgo translated and updated (03:45:33 PM) danilo: qgil: well, I don't see why you have a problem with using same system for software strings, documentation and web translation (03:45:56 PM) qgil: my problem is to see what workflow we need to define to go from a web editor creating or modifying a wgo English page to the translators aknowledging the change, translating the new content and getting it published in the localized versions of wgo (03:47:06 PM) danilo: qgil: well, with docs/UI, we watch for CVS commits and then update progress.gnome.org (or run l10n-status.gnome.org software periodically) (03:47:26 PM) danilo: and translators are able to see what is below 100% on these status pages (03:48:03 PM) qgil: danilo: it's great you see clearly a solution, this proofs my theory that a i18n person needs to take part in the wgo planning proces as soon as we have the CMS in place :) -- Quim Gil /// http://desdeamericaconamor.org
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part