Re: Translate Gnome documents with English GUI and native GUI

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Mon, Oct 28, 2002 at 09:51:47PM +0700, pclouds wrote:
> Hi all
> 
> I am the leader of Vietnamese Translation Team. We would like to translate
> Gnome documents into Vietnamese. We would like to create documents for 
> both English GUI and Vietnamese GUI. The question is: is there anyway to
> create one DocBook document to generate two document (one for English GUI
> and one for Vietnamese GUI)?

There are two answers to this (and the Sun team may have others, since
they have translated a few documents):

(1) Yes, you can. You use the 'lang' attribute on every single DocBook
tag that is localised and have a lang='C' and lang='vi' version.

(2) No, you don't want to do it that way. By putting both versions in
the one document, you end up making it about twice as long (and think
about what happens for other languages as well). It is easier in a
practical sense to keep translations in separate documents.

That leaves open the problem of how to keep the documents synchronised.
One day I will get off my butt and get doc-i18n-tool working so that it
can extract things in a po-compatible format. Something like that is
necessary, otherwise you need to do it manually.

I have been helping somebody who translated the porting guide into
Korean. We decided on the separate document approach and are keeping an
eye on ways we can include common portions between the two versions. It
really did seem easier that way (although a certain amount of build
magic has been required because it was easier for him to work in a
non UTF-8 encoding and the XML processing tools wanted UTF-8, but that
was only a technical issue).

Malcolm

-- 
The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.