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Thanks Christian, this is very useful indeed.
I'm currently looking at a mechanism of converting the DocBook format to a marked up format that can be used safely in OpenOffice (or, dare I say it, MS Word). The goal, as is common with localisation process, is to separate the localisable content from the formatting/structure and providing an automated mechanism to recombine it for the target locales. Novell already have a number of excellent doc processing tools that may be applicable in this space though I've a little research to do to be sure of this. I'll be sure to keep you posted.
Cheers Steve. Stephen Holmes
Manager, Localisation - User Experience Services Voice: +353-1-605-8087
Fax: +353-1-605-8200 Cell: +353-86-833-5027 Novell, Inc., the leading provider of information solutions
http://www.novell.com >>> Christian Rose <menthos@gnome.org> 31/08/2003 22:29:06 >>> fre 2003-08-29 klockan 22.34 skrev Stephen Holmes: > Hi GTP Members, > > I'm the localisation manager for Novell's product development group > and am based, with my team, in Dublin. I'm hoping to learn how you > guys get Gnome and Ximian software/documentation localised. I hope I > can share some our approaches with you aswell to the overall benefit > of the community. Hi, and most welcome! It's certainly very nice to have the support of Novell in the localization effort of GNOME and Ximian applications. I think this, together with Sun's help, is a great and important step. In the GTP, we work with translating software located in GNOME CVS. Our localization is based on gettext and intltool, and much of the work is done with the translation status pages at http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/status/ used as a continous reference. Those pages are made by Carlos Perelló Marín < carlos@gnome.org > and are automatically updated several times a day. They don't just provide uptodate statistics but also msgmerged, intltool-updated pot and po files, which translators can download and work on. Only some translators have CVS access, but we try to have at least one translator in each language team have it. Thus, all translators can send their finished work to someone in their language team that can help commit their work. The language teams are pretty much independant and deciding themselves on both how they want to work organization-wise, and what tools they use. As examples of this, some teams have a pretty strict control of which translators maintain what translations, while other teams have web-based systems that allows everyone with web access easy access and possibility to contribute via the web. Also the tools vary. Some teams are heavy users of translation memories and compendiums, while many aren't, etc. Our work is very much focused on translation of the applications themselves -- only very few teams also contribute and maintain documentation translations. I guess this is partly due to the UI being prioritized, but also due to the translation of documentation, and the maintaining of Docbook XML translations, being both rather difficult and unfamiliar to translators used to the PO format. There have been several efforts to create Docbook XML<->PO conversion tools, but we still need to work out how to use those on a large scale in order to bring translated documentation to many languages. That's at least my attempt on doing a brief introduction of our current work and status. This mailing list (gnome-i18n@gnome.org ) acts as a common, central, and official forum for GNOME translators. We also have an IRC channel, #i18n, on irc.gnome.org, where we typically chat and have more informal translation related discussions. For discussions related to documentation translation, the gnome-doc-list@gnome.org mailing list is typically also an useful forum to consult. There are lots of people experienced with Docbook XML there. Once again, welcome! Christian |