Re: PO-based Documentation Translation

[Tim Foster <Tim Foster Sun COM>]

hi there!

On Wed, 2003-10-01 at 13:48, Keld Jørn Simonsen wrote:
> Probably gettext/.po system is some of the best software around for
> translations. At least it is some of the most used and most productive.

What alternatives have you tried to the po format ?

> I would imagine that Sun products are much less
> translated than MS windows. Also Sun products are less present in the
> "real world" than Windows and Linux, more than 90 % of all Unix
> systems in the world are Linux systems, and on my fairly well used
> site, there are more than a hundred times more Linux users than SunOS
> users.
> So as far as I can see, Linux is "real world", whils Sun is something
> in a niche.

What's this, "bait the Sun employee"-day ? Sorry - I've had lunch
already (and disagree with some of your comments, particularly the last
one :-) What's your point ?

Sun, Oracle, Novell, Microsoft, IBM and several translation companies
saw the need for XLIFF and they wouldn't have invested in it if any
pre-existing format was going to cut it.

> let's build on that succes, make it better by all means, but I hesitate
> to switch to something that has not stood the test of time, on big
> translation projects, like the .po file format.
> 
> .po files rulez!

Hmm - validate a po file for me, mark sections of text as being non
translatable, include fuzzy match, glossary and machine translation
information, along with information about the tools that were used to do
that, with references to translation guides and I'll think about it.

To do all this, you end up mangling the po format in an ungodly way to
make it work and it's not easy to do (particularly the marking certain
sections as being non translatable) - I tried it once and it was ugly.

Po format in our view was insufficient for automating docs translation
on a large scale, and that's why we don't use it.

A reason I *can* see for using po, is that everyone else uses it -
de-facto standards are great : everyone can read MS Word documents these
days, but it doesn't make them the best tool for the job.

Certainly doing software translation is very doable using po, but docs
are a different story (though like I said in a previous mail, you could
do work here, but your still left dealing with the other problems I
point out in this mail)

	cheers,
			tim