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

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

Thanks for the feedback, Sander. Some additional comments inline.

On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 06:34:42PM +0000, Sander Vesik wrote:
>  --- Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au> wrote: 
[...]
> > (1) Extracting the strings
> > 
> > 	When run, the program is given a list of tags which are considered
> > 	"block elements" (by analogy with the concept in HTML). These tags are
> > 	the ones which do not have significant bearing on the ability of their
> > 	contents to be translated. So they are dropped in the conversion to po
> > 	format. By way of example, in HTML we would consider the following tags
> > 	to be amongst those which are block elements: p, h1, h2, br, hr, table,
> > 	and so on.
> > 
> 
> A big problem with doing this on block level approach is that you do not get 
> any amount of reuse. So having translated <menuchoice> <guimenu>File</guimenu>
> <guimenuitem>Open</guimenuitem></menuchoice> once doesn't help you at all to
> get somewhere with the next (possibly hundreds) of occurences. There are a
> lot of different occurences of <guimenu>, <guilabel>, <guimenuitem> and 
> <guibutton> with alrgely the same contents. This may have to be a separate
> pretranslation step though.

I see what you are saying here. I maybe need to add a way to specify
that certain tags encapsulate "constant" words of phrases that need only
be translated once. The drawback with that is that a translator still
needs to translate all the surrounding text and so either he translates
the menu item each time or we need to have a way of representing that an
already translated unit goes there. Because the position of the menu
item in the sentence -- or even the paragraph -- will move about, the
original text, or a proxy representative, needs to remain in the msgstr.

I'll think about this one.

[..]
> > 	[NOTE: It has also been floated that, since the source is usually
> > 	under a C/ directory, alternative translations can go in directories
> > 	labelled by their locale name -- so es/, no/, and so forth. The files
> > 	in these directory would still be .po format files so that translators
> > 	can use their current familiar techniques.]
> > 
> 
> This is by now the standard - all localised docs are in their own
> subdirectories

The final documents, yes. I am thinking out loud about the po files
which are used to generate the translated documents. But I think I
will use directories named after the locale, since it's not too hard to
make the build process only package the final document.

Malcolm

-- 
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