Re: PO-based Documentation Translation (wa Re: Weekly i18n statusupdate)

["Andrew W. Nosenko" <awn bcs zp ua>]

[Sorry for cite from Stephen Holmes's e-mail, but I don't see Alexander's
original...]

Stephen Holmes wrote:
: >>> Alexander Kirillov <kirillov@math.sunysb.edu> 25/09/2003 23:19:22
: >>>
: This has been discussed - and no consensus was reached. I personally
: do not feel that PO format is suitable for docs. PO files deal with a
: collection of clearly defined units (messages), with no relation
: between them. Docs do not look like that, and I do not know how to
: present a document as a series of such units. For example, taking each
: paragraph as a "message" can sometimes cause trouble: in my
: translating experience, I sometimes felt the need to break a paragraph
: in two, so there is no 1-1 correspondence between paragraphs of
: original doc and paragraphs of translation. There are other issues,
: too. So I found that updating translations using good old diff mode of
: emacs was easier.
:
:  This, of course, is a matter of choice: if most translators feel that
: PO format is what they need, we should start thinking about moving to
: it.  But I see many problems with this, and not enough benefits.

I'm totally agree.

`1 English paragraph <-> n Russian paragraphs' are no big deal yet.  But
what to do with `n English paragraph <-> 1 Russian paragraph' relation?
Or with documentation analogs of 
    printf("<bold>%s</bold>%s", _("No"), _("preview available"));
???

Sorry and excuse me, but *many* of English speaking peoples merely
don't understand, what another languages are exist, and rules of these
languages may be *very* different from English.  And as example -- this
my e-mail.  I'm sure that my sentences are understandable (may be), but
totally wrong in grammatically sense for English.

-- 
Andrew W. Nosenko    (awn@bcs.zp.ua)