Re: PO-based Documentation Translation

[Karl Eichwalder <ke gnu franken de>]

Tim Foster <Tim.Foster@Sun.COM> writes:

> msgid "a,b,c,d"
> msgstr "a,b,c,d"
>
>
> However, doing it this way means that if a single sentence changes, the
> entire paragraph gets marked as a "new" message (probably a strong fuzzy
> match) in an automatic translation system.

My proposal to solve this problem was: keep track of the previous msgid
and add it as a comment (using a marker like '#|') while doing the
msgmerge step:

#, fuzzy
#| "a,b,c,d"
msgid "a1,b,c,d"
msgstr "a,b,c,d"

Then it is easy _and_ reliable to run diff resp. wdiff or ediff on the
old and the new msgid and you will see the differences without any
doubt.

> The better approach, is to segment the text at a sentence level : this
> can be very hard[1], but is ultimately worth it. That would give you the
> messages :

Splitting at the sentence level can cause other problems.  What's a
sentence is different from language to language.

> In fact, there's another bonus too, since if the sentence "A launcher
> can reside in a panel or a menu" appears in another document, but not in
> exactly the same paragaph context, you still have the translation in
> your database and can reuse that.

There is no guarantee it will fit this way.

> Sentence-segmenting this paragraph isn't trivial : done properly, you
> should get the segments :
>
> This is a piece of <b>bold text.</b>
> <b>This is a new sentence that</b> isn't in bold any more.

I case of <b> (= bold) this will work; it may or may not work for
other elements; thus you are better off converting or escaping the
inline "tags" (and convert it back once the translation is done).
Depending on your data something as follows may work:

    This is a piece of !!b>bold text.

    This is a new sentence that!!/b> isn't in bold any more.

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