Re: About translating documents (.xml/.sgml) in GNOME

[Kjartan Maraas <kmaraas online no>]

tor, 2003-01-30 kl. 01:07 skrev Malcolm Tredinnick:

[snip intro]

> This might be a good opportunity to float another approach to this
> problem. I looked at DV and Jonathans' work last year and I didn't think
> it entirely met the requirements we might have. So I sat down and wrote
> out a specification of what might be in such a tool (a documentation
> version of intltool, essentially).
> 
Has anyone compared this to po2xml from the KDE side? Or any other
approaches? I know Red Hat have made the transition for some of their
docs, but I'm not sure what tool they're using to do this. Would be nice
to draw on existing code if possible. I also think Sun has tools to do
this kind of stuff, but they're probably not available to the general
public. Still they're surely one of the best sources of input on what to
put in a spec like this if they've been using tools like this for some
time.

> I have attached a fairly different approach to the problem from Simos'
> which I would appreciate some feedback on. My main problem is that I am
> not a translator, so while I have tried to incorporate what I see as the
> main issues, there may be things I don't realise just because I don't
> speak Norwegian or something like that.
> 
Norwegian is a very simple language with a fairly reasonable amount of
quirks, so I'll let the others chime in here. ;-)

> As an aside, one of the motivations of this approach was to also make it
> easy to translate websites without requiring special markup in the HTML.
> 
> I have code for some of the following (mostly extracting the strings for
> translation and constructing something that is pretty close to a valid
> .po file). If people cannot shoot too many holes in my method I will
> continue down this path, although that does not help Simos with his
> immediate problem of translating _now_.
>
> Probably I should point out that the main problem I see in Simos'
> approach is that you will get a lost of unnecessary stuff in the .po
> file, which looks like it will interfere with smooth translations. Also,
> I could not see how some of the "issues to be resolved" were addresses
> by that code (to be fair, the authors mentioned at the time that it was
> a prototype of an idea).

I think it's _very_ nice to see that this work is being picked up again.
Beer on me next time.

Cheers
Kjartan