Re: PO-based Documentation Translation

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

fre 2003-09-26 klockan 15.16 skrev Tim Foster:
> I've mentioned this before[1] : we've an article on the advantages of
> XLIFF at
> 
> http://developers.sun.com/dev/gadc/technicalpublications/articles/xliff.html
> 
> (there's an interesting screenshot on that page of an editing
> application that I believe could be useful to the GNOME community :
> since it edits XLIFF, you could use the same application to translate
> files converted from po, html, sgml, xml, etc. Fuzzy matches from
> previously translated material (across all formats) can also be shown in
> a separate window, with an indication as to where the texts differ)
> 
> I apologise for the delay in determining whether these things can
> released, and in the meantime, if you choose to go down a route other
> than XLIFF, I can't blame you (since I don't have the power to help out
> yet)
> 
> That said, I would strongly recommend at least considering a format
> designed from the ground up to support the needs of localisation. XLIFF
> really does fit the bill here imho. We do have technology to allow
> translators to translate a range of different source formats in a single
> unified manner, and I'm dying to see if you'd find it useful.

The article mentioned above is *very* interesting -- thanks for
providing that link. To anyone who hasn't read it and is interested in
this topic, I strongly recommend taking the time to read it.

It seems XLIFF has several benefits. It
* Is designed from the ground up with localization in mind
* Adds many highly useful properties and primitives to messages, that
are missing from simpler formats like .po
* Is standardized and XML-based which aids machine-based parsing

On the other hand, it
* Would add yet another format to the process
* Adds lot of extra syntax
* Seems to be much less suited than .po for direct editing and requires
using a special tool/editor for the format to be really useful and not
get in the way

I think the last points are very important from a GTP perspective. In
general we want the barriers for entry in aiding the GNOME Translation
Project to be as low as possible, so as to attract as many contributors,
and as a consequence, translations, as possible.
The simplicity of the po format is a great benefit in this regard. The
syntax is simple and reduced to a minimum and it doesn't really require
a specialized editor, but can be edited by hand in an ordinary text
editor. In fact, it seems that many of the current translators do work
this way when editing the translations.
In theory, one could even fetch the translation from the web, edit it in
Notepad on a Windows machine, and send it to someone with cvs access
without ever using a specialized tool of any kind, or feeling a strong
need to do so.

That being said, it seems XLIFF would have its uses, in particular for
behind-the-scenes processing like, as an example, a backend format for
translation memory tools and the like. But I don't think it's a format
that we would like to directly expose volunteer translators to.


Christian