Re: Manual page translations

[Clytie Siddall <clytie riverland net au>]

I'm really glad this has come up again. :)

On 23/05/2006, at 2:23 PM, Brent Smith wrote:

> I've been looking at getting the manual page translations to work in
> yelp.  There was a sorting/priority issue that I figured out with
> respect to which man pages should have precedence (obviously  
> translated
> man pages for your $LANGUAGE should have precedence over others), but
> now I am facing another problem.
>
> It seems that man pages are not translated in utf-8.  This means we  
> have
> to perform character set conversion between whatever code page is
> appropriate for your language into UTF-8 (and then I need to  
> rewrite the
> man parser with utf-8 in mind).  Can anyone point me to some
> documentation about how this is usually done?  Specifically, how do I
> determine the appropriate character set conversion to do based on the
> value of $LANGUAGE?

Bruno Haible has released a groff-utf8 patch, and is currently  
working on a full groff release which will support UTF-8.

http://www.haible.de/bruno/packages-groff-utf8.html

I translated my pilot manpage:

http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/guide/project/manpages

in PO format, using the po4a converter. In its final manpage format,  
it reads perfectly using groff-utf8.

So I can't see why any manpage translated into a UTF-8 language  
wouldn't display in a UTF-8 enabled reader like Yelp.

If we have manpages which have been translated into legacy encodings,  
that's something that needs updating, not something we want to waste  
effort backporting to support. UTF-8 is the standard, all languages  
can use it, and all current free-software translation efforts do use it.

A lot of the translated manpages are old packages. We need them  
updated. I think it makes more sense to focus on getting them  
updated, standardize the process, and make it possible for UTF-8  
manpages to be read. Once mainstream readers like Yelp are available  
for UTF-8 manpages, more translators will be motivated to update  
their manpages. (Integrating po4a into interfaces like Pootle will  
encourage a lot more translation, since that means manpages available  
in PO format.)

I've been hoping to get manpage-translation standardized through the  
Translation Project, but I need to test my pilot manpage more. What's  
held the testing up has been the lack of UTF-8 manpage readers. ;)

from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm  
Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN