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

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 01:48:09AM +0100, Kjartan Maraas wrote:
> tor, 2003-01-30 kl. 01:07 skrev Malcolm Tredinnick:
> 
> [snip intro]
> 
> > This might be a good opportunity to float another approach to this
> > problem. I looked at DV and Jonathans' work last year and I didn't think
> > it entirely met the requirements we might have. So I sat down and wrote
> > out a specification of what might be in such a tool (a documentation
> > version of intltool, essentially).
> > 
> Has anyone compared this to po2xml from the KDE side? Or any other
> approaches? I know Red Hat have made the transition for some of their
> docs, but I'm not sure what tool they're using to do this. Would be nice
> to draw on existing code if possible. I also think Sun has tools to do
> this kind of stuff, but they're probably not available to the general
> public. Still they're surely one of the best sources of input on what to
> put in a spec like this if they've been using tools like this for some
> time.

At the time Daniel and Jonathan wrote doc-i18n, the docs list looked at
the KDE stuff and decided it was specific to their particular
environment. I have not looked recently, though, so this may have
changed. Will add it to the TODO list.

I have no idea what magic Sun invokes to translate their documents.
Something I was fairly aware of when writing this spec was the need to
make it easy for translators to track changes in the master document. A
couple of people have translated documents I have previously written
manually and there is a real problem when I fix in an error in the
source doc and trying to get it to filter up to the translations.

Malcolm

-- 
Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.