Re: Translation tools for documentation

[Danilo Segan <danilo gnome org>]

Hi Tim,

Today at 9:41, Tim Foster wrote:

> 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 :-)

Nice invitation, thank you very much :)

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

This looks very nice, though, IMHO, a bit too complicated (it'd be
great if it translated documentation for me :).

> 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.

A concrete question about this.  While it sounds nice to translate
per-sentence (promoting better reuse of translations), I wonder what
happens with things like following DocBook snippets?
  <para>You can do: 
   <itemizedlist>
    <listitem><para>First thing to do</para></listitem>
    <listitem><para>Second thing to do</para></listitem>
    <listitem><para>Other thing to do</para></listitem>
   </itemizedlist>
   Any of these things will achieve something.
  </para>

I did come across similar cases in current documentation of Gnome.
What I wonder is what is considered a sentence here. "You can do:" is
obviously not a finished sentence, and the list can really be a part
of the sentence itself.

> 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...

That's good to hear.

> 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.

Indeed, XLIFF is probably much better container format for
localisation.  The problem with it is the lack of free tools (and one
excellent editor which might become available doesn't solve that
issue).  I blame that on the complexity of XLIFF and the overwhelming
number of features.

Translators working on free software translations rarely have the
time to dedicate to learning all about PO files themselves, and PO
files are very simple compared to XLIFF.

Of course, the tool you're talking about releasing as free software
would make knowing XLIFF unnecessary for translators, but we'd need
to re-educate a bunch of those supporting PO files currently :)

> 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.

Yeah, I don't see that as an issue, apart of it meaning that it
can't happen in the next release cycle (for Gnome 2.8), where I'd
like to see some translated documentation as well :)

I still believe PO files are the way to go _now_, because converting
them into XLIFF should be simple once the tools and infrastracture are
ready.

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

I, as well, hope many people will make use of whatever suits them
best.  Since it's easy to establish a map from PO-to-XLIFF (the
latter is sort of a superset-in-features of PO files, right?), there
should be no problems in later migrating to XLIFF, provided that is
considered the best option at some point in the future.

The one big advantage of PO files currently is that translators know
how to work with them, and need not learn anything.  And yeah, there
are many *easily-available* free-software tools that work with them.

> 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

It looks very nice (or rather, the features exposed in this
screenshot look very nice, like highlighting changes between
sentences -- I'm not that fond of Java GUI [at least that's how it
looks to me, I may be wrong, I don't use Java apps very much], but
that's understandable: Gtk+ is much better looking :) and I'm looking 
forward to having a chance to try it out.

Cheers,
Danilo