Re: Translation tools for documentation

[Tim Foster <Tim Foster Sun COM>]

Hi Francisco & gnome-i18n people everywhere,

We're (still) in the process of open sourcing our translation tools, and
will definitely have an announcement about these before GUADEC this
year[1] (which I'll be at, if anyone wants to assault me in person :-)

There's some more information about the approach we're taking at :
http://developers.sun.com/dev/gadc/technicalpublications/articles/xliff.html

The main advantage I see in this approach, is that it can be used
effectively across file formats and rather than extracting paragraphs of
text, our system extracts sentences : the finer granularity meaning that
you should get more reuse between components. Of course as has been
mentioned before on this list, there's then the problem of context, but
we haven't found this a problem in the year or so of using these tools
at Sun when translating software and documentation.

In particular, we have filters already written and in production at Sun
for Docbook SGML, HTML and a generic XML filter, which I think may be of
use to people out there trying to translate GNOME documentation. We're
working on other filters all the time...


Tools that convert <format-x> into po will certainly do the job here
too, but I believe that xliff is a better technical solution to the
problem, since it was specifically designed to act as a localisation
container format from the ground up.

Of course, the disadvantage here, is that they wouldn't tie as nicely in
with the translator status pages, but it would be a doddle to convert
xliff into po as a quick hack to make this work.

That said, you're free to use which ever tools work for you - I'm only
trying to help :-)

	cheers,
			tim


[1] or I'll eat my hat. (honest!)

I know I mentioned the possibility of this release a while back on the
list, but behind the scenes, I've been working very hard to try to get
these tools released and we're nearly there.

Here's a screenshot of the editor tool translating some GNOME docs :
http://www.netsoc.ucd.ie/~timf/Screenshot-TransEditor.png


On Sat, 2004-03-27 at 00:53, Francisco Javier F. Serrador wrote:
> Hello guys
> 
> Could you tell me what kind of tools we have avaliable to translate
> GNOME documentation?
> 
> I can only find xmlpo and OmegaT
-- 
Tim Foster - Translation Technology Engineer, Software Globalization
http://sunweb.ireland/~timf
http://www.netsoc.ucd.ie/~timf