Re: PO-based Documentation Translation

[Paul Gampe <pgampe redhat com>]

On Sun, 28 Sep 2003 08:24 pm, Christian Rose wrote:

<snip>

> It seems XLIFF has several benefits. It
> * Is designed from the ground up with localization in mind
> * Adds many highly useful properties and primitives to messages, that
> are missing from simpler formats like .po
> * Is standardized and XML-based which aids machine-based parsing
>
> On the other hand, it
> * Would add yet another format to the process
> * Adds lot of extra syntax
> * Seems to be much less suited than .po for direct editing and requires
> using a special tool/editor for the format to be really useful and not
> get in the way

We came to the same conclusion here at Red Hat.  The benefits of XLIFF did not 
out way the benefits of using gettext po file format for our SGML DocBook 
documentation.

The primary benefits we have seen are:

We maintain compendiums built from the software translations we do internally 
and then use these to ensure consistency with the documents we localize 
describing the applications

Our localization team do not need to re-learn a new tool.  We use kbabel to 
translate both Red Hat software and DocBook documentation

I did have to write SGML DocBook <-> gettext po software as our documentation 
team are power users of SGML and none of the OSS projects at the time seemed 
to cope with the complex structures they created.

Paul