Re: PO-based Documentation Translation

[Keld Jørn Simonsen <keld dkuug dk>]

On Wed, Oct 01, 2003 at 02:44:16PM +0100, Tim Foster wrote:
> hi there!
> 
> On Wed, 2003-10-01 at 13:48, Keld J??rn 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 ?

My point is that GTP is the "real world" - while Sun systems are niche
products at least in the workstation market AFAICT. I was just provoked
by somebody indicating that GTP was not the "real world". GTP performs - 
in myriads of languages every day - on tens of millions computers all
over the world.

Apart from that I welcome better technologi for GTP and other Open
Source translation projects. I have myself wanted to start a system
for GTP document translatations with associated CVS and statistics web
access as I once did for the message strings - but I have not had the
time yet. That idea was also to use compendia in the translations.
So I am interested in the subject.

I have also asked for refinement for QA for GTP and asked if some
industry prople like Sun could explain us about the techniques they
employ.

> 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.

And what are your experiences? Which products have used these
technologies, and to what extent? How many messages translated,
how many projects? What is the track record?

> > 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.

Sounds like what we have for GTP and also for kde?
msgfmt validates .po files
Text to be left untranslated is simply not marked for translation.
Fuzzy match is standard in msgmerge.
glossary and machine translation can be done with compendia and kbabel.
kbabel marks which tools that are used.
> 
> 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.

How long ago was your attempt?


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

It seems like you are referencing some old version of .po-files and
associated tools.

> 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)

Yes, there are some other issues for document translation that you need
to look at. I do think that the kde tools actually breaks paragraphs up
in smaller entities (without really having examinated it). I also did
some translation work for OpenOffice.org which used some translation
memory for small phrases of 1 to 6 or 7 words, it had a long list of
terms and phrases, and that I think was really productive. 

A key to all for this is that new software need to be open source - if
not, I do not think we can use it on a large scale as GTP is.

One more thing I was interested in, is QA: what to do when the initial
translation is done, to ensure correctness etc. Has Sun got any tools in
that area?

best regards
Keld