Re: doc-i18n-tool

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

Karl Eichwalder wrote:
> > The idea here is to give the translators a .po file (which they should
> > already be used to) along with the doc to do their translating with.
> 
> This idea is more than flawed :)

Not at all :-)


> Documents you're talking about is linear running text; yes there are
> chapter and sections and also otherwise linked text segments.  But in
> general it's linear text, page 1, 2, 3,...

Agreed.


> Thus it's logical that we want to preseve this context info

What's the difference? I usually have more than enough context in a po
file to translate the messages of an application without any big
problems.
Granted, in some cases there are problems with context, but in
documentation, with the paragraphs as messages in a po file, I would
have even more context per message, probably in most cases more than
enough.

And if you want to read the whole document in-order before starting to
translate it, you can still do that.


> and we just
> have to add the "flags" or "attributes" as known from the gettext tools
> collection.  Either use some advanced XML linking feature (not supported
> by Emacs) or go for marked sections, a SGML feature:
> 
> Then we should adjust Abiword and Emacs/psgml to support these SGML
> documents properly.
[...]
> 
> I don't see the point why one wants to use the nice but somehow oscure
> PO file format.

Tools. Works with every editor. Extensive support. The ability to
include docs translation status with our regular status system. I could
go on and on with advantages of po format and the possibilities it gives
us.


Basically I think a tool which lets us use the tools we have used for
years, and lets us integrate the translation processes of both the
applications themselves and the documentation, is a lot better than one
that has to be implemented, and would make an in my opinion unnecessary
distinction between applications and their documentation, and on the
same time would need modifications to editors to be usable.

(Yes, that was an awful sentence. I would make an awful docs guy ;-)


Christian