Re: Translation tools for documentation

[Danilo Segan <danilo gnome org>]

Yesterday at 1:53, Francisco Javier F. Serrador wrote:

> Could you tell me what kind of tools we have avaliable to translate
> GNOME documentation?

xml2po (now in gnome-doc-utils module in Gnome CVS, not built by
default yet) will probably be the tool used to generate translatable
PO files of documentation in Gnome, which will be used for statistics
and similar stuff.

> I can only find xmlpo and OmegaT

OmegaT doesn't seem too useful for general purpose XML documents,
like we have in Gnome (DocBook). OTOH, I didn't pay much attention to
it, so I don't really know.

Tools for translating documentation in Gnome are currently lacking,
but I find xml2po sufficient already, and I extend it currently on
trial-and-error basis (as I come across new, unhandled stuff in
documents I translate, I extend it).  That's not the best approach,
but I was able to translate zenity and bug-buddy manuals so far
without a problem.

Nice feature of xml2po is that it is designed to correspond exactly
to Gnome documentation translation.  So, for instance, when you merge
your translation back from a po file, it will use the basename
(eg. "sr" from sr.po) to set the "lang" attribute on <article>, and
it will add corresponding translators credits in <articleinfo> based
on the translation of "translator-credits" message.

There's a nice README (if it's not nice, please send improvements, or
ask to commit them directly :), and --help option which lists
available options.

For Gnome 2.8, xml2po will probably be a build requirement for CVS
builds of Gnome (tarballs will have pregenerated translated
documentation).

I currently strongly suggest you keep your translations in PO files,
since it will ease reuse and updates very much.

Cheers,
Danilo