Re: Manual page translations

[Clytie Siddall <clytie riverland net au>]

Hi everyone :)

Sorry it's taken me a while to get back to this.

On 27/05/2006, at 10:28 PM, Yavor Doganov wrote:

> Данило Шеган wrote:
> > On Wednesday at 15:17, Yavor Doganov wrote:
> > > If someone submits vi translation of the bash manpage, for instance,
> > > and it is included in the next bash release, a Vietnamese user will
> > > see garbled text when he/she types `man bash' to view it (unless, of
> > > course, he/she goes through the hassle of patching groff).

It's not much of a hassle. We've all gone through much more than that  
to set up legacy encoding systems, so we can have docs and programs  
display in our own language.

My interim plan, until we have utf-8-capable manpage readers in  
default installs, was to document the few steps needed to set up the  
user system to display translated manpages in their language. It's  
certainly worth it to many users. It's worth it to me. As I've said  
before, internationalization isn't about how good your English is.  
It's about who you are.
> > And a user (hopefuly) complains to his distributor, distributor
> > acknowledges the issue, and issues a fix: patched groff, perhaps with
> > all manpages converted to UTF-8 (so nothing breaks for anybody
> > else).

Indeed. Bruno hadn't put much priority into updating groff, until I  
asked for help with UTF-8 manpages. We make things happen. It might  
not always be straightforward, but effort put into the system will  
result in change.
> I'd wish it was so, but it's not going to happen, at least not in
> Debian (the GNU distribution with the most complete set of manpages
> and locales).  The patch that Clytie points to is actually a temporary
> workararound, not the "right thing" to do even according to upstream.

Until the UTF-8 readers come out. Yelp will be one of them, groff  
will be another.
> AFAIK there is already UTF-8 support in CVS, but I don't know when
> it'll be released (as most GNU packages -- when it is ready).  Also,
> as far as I'm aware, it won't be necessary to convert all existing
> manpages to UTF-8, as there is a preprocessor included.

That will help. As Brent points out, the readers need a way of  
finding out which encoding is required, like the charset header in PO  
files.
> Of course, Yelp uses a completely different mechanism so it is a good
> idea to implement it.  My objection, if at all can be called so, is
> that sending *translated in UTF-8* manpages upstream will make many
> users nervous.  They'll have to either open them in Yelp (2.16?) or
> apply the dirty hack that their distros are not going to do.
If your language requires UTF-8, you will take advantage of it being  
available.

Brent, sorry I didn't send you a file before. I've just sent my pilot  
Vietnamese manpage (find). I'm really pleased to see the Japanese  
java page displays so well, but I can't take credit for it: my  
Japanese is negligible!

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