Re: Translation of the man pages: good/bad idea?

[Clytie Siddall <clytie riverland net au>]

On 25/08/2005, at 11:01 PM, Vincent Untz wrote:

> We're shipping some manpages with GNOME. Today, I discovered po4a [1].
> It seems it enables an easier translation of the manpages.
>
> Do we want to translate the manpages too? If yes, would using this  
> tool
> help?
>
> What do you think?

I started a mini-project on this, to test out some procedures. The  
good news is that GNU would be happy to put all their manpages  
through the Translation Project at U. MontrÃal, providing we can  
supply the same infrastructure for them there as we do for  
application files.

The main difficulty, we found, was viewing UTF-8 manpages. The new  
Yelp will definitely help (rhymes ;) ), and Bruno has recently  
updated (n)roff to handle UTF-8 as well!

So translating manpages is now not only possible, but reasonably  
doable. What I've been trying to achieve is a procedure that would  
simplify the process for language teams. I can't work on that now,  
with the Gnome and Debian releases imminent, but I hope to get back  
to it soon.

So, Vincent, yes, po4a does help. When I translated my pilot manpage  
(find1), I used Pootle (which has po4a integrated) to convert the  
manpage into PO format. I then translated the manpage on Pootle,  
converted it back to (n)roff ... and then ran into viewing problems.  
Since those look like they're solved now, the whole process is  
looking much more doable.

Can I get back in touch with you when I can start working on this  
again? The idea is to pilot some manpages, get feedback from the  
translation teams and manpage maintainers, try a managed release and  
get feedback from users, then write up a pro-tem guideline for  
language teams translating manpages, which we hope will simplify the  
process as well as ensure an effective standard of translation. This  
is important to GNU, and I think, to every translation team.

So far, manpages have been translated in individual packages,  
occasionally distributed. We need an overall procedure on which  
maintainers, translators and users can rely (like out existing  
application-translation procedure ;) ).

So I'm very pleased you want to do this, Vincent. i'm also struck  
with admiration that you can make time to do it now! :D

from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhÃm  
Viát hÃa phán mám tá do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN