Re: (OT) Re: PO-based Documentation Translation

[Dave Malcolm <david davemalcolm demon co uk>]

On Mon, 2003-10-06 at 19:19, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
> Somewhat offtopic, but still I need to know...
> 
> For Mandrake newsletters I do translations as well. Currently this is a
> highly amateuristic process where txt and html versions of the newsletter
> are e-mailed to translators after which they can send back the modified
> result. This means translating the same document twice(!).
> 
> >From what I know of XML and XSLT (not so much), it should be possible to
> have one XML source and transform it to HTML, TXT or whatever. The subject
> of GNOME documentation is somewhat related to this question. Can anyone
> suggest where to start? Is Conglomerate a good editor to use for a
> translation task where the translators do not know any XML?

Conglomerate ought to hide most of the XML from you, allowing you to
write and translate your document in DocBook with a pleasant
user-interface, and then export as HTML, as TXT, and eventually as PDF,
Word, AbiWord etc etc.

Unfortunately it isn't quite stable enough to be dependable for
production use yet, although I'm "dogfooding" with it myself for all my
XML and HTML editing and it's become much more usable in the last
month.  Give us another month!  (or dive in, try it, and reports bugs in
Bugzilla)

The two main problems are:
(i) it's too slow for documents of more than about a page  (I'll be
working on this soon, and hope to have it whizzing along by the end of
the month)
(ii) it doesn't _yet_ support GTK Input Methods, and so entering
non-Roman alphabets probably doesn't work.  I could really use some help
with this: can people on the i18n team point me in the direction of some
good reference material on this?  The API documentation that I've found
is sparse.

> 
> Thanks for any advice,
-- 
David Malcolm
www.conglomerate.org