Re: Gnome2 User Guide: translate it!

[Clytie Siddall <clytie riverland net au>]

Thanks for your helpful reply, Danilo :)

On 23/02/2006, at 8:34 PM, Danilo Åegan wrote:
> > On 23/02/2006, at 5:09 AM, Danilo Åegan wrote:
> >
> > > By the mighty Shaun, our fellow GDP leader, we present you Gnome2  
> > > User
> > > Guide in translatable PO files:
> > >
> > >   http://kvota.net/doc-l10n/by-modules.html#gnome2-user-guide
> >
> > This is a great move! :D
>
> I only changed it to gnome-user-guide instead of gnome*2* (to follow
> the package name) now.

Makes for a great acronym. :D
> > I don't know if the GUG is the same, but when I was trying to
> > translate the Debian-Installer User Guide, I found the length of many
> > of the strings intimidating and frustrating. PO format doesn't work
> > very well for l-o-n-g, complex paragraphs.
>
> That's why xml2po tries to hard to split them wherever possible.
> Debian is not using xml2po for their own purposes, and I don't know
> what is their procedure.

I'm really glad to hear xml2po does that. :)
> > Firstly, you struggle away for ages and end up with ... 3 strings
> > completed.
> >
> > Secondly, it's harder to find errors in l-o-n-g, complex paragraph
> > strings.
>
> Now, our stats generation is using a different PO merging script from
> msgmerge to provide diffs which help greatly in such situations (small
> changes in complex paragraphs).

That will make a big difference.
> I've even talked about it on last GUADEC in Stuttgart, and even
> blogged about it here:
>
>   http://danilo.segan.org/blog/prevod/po-merging-and-diffs
>
> So, simple and small fixes should be easier to track and correct in
> translations if you grab PO files from our status pages.

<sigh of relief> Thanks. I will give it a go, and give some feedback. :)
> > I know we need cogent strings, but I'd be strongly in favour of
> > splitting long or complex paragraph strings into sentence-strings, or
> > at least shorter strings, if that worked for the text.
>
> I've been thinking about it, and it's not too hard to implement, BUT,
> I'd rather have sentence-splitting in a separate tool: you sometimes
> need to re-order sentences in the translation and it wouldn't be
> possible then.

Yes, that's true, it should be a different stage.
> > Linguistically, it should work, since a sentence is a complete
> > statement of its own, but that will depend on the text. ;)
>
> You sometimes also want to lose a couple of sentences, if something
> can be more clearly said in a translation.  I figured the
> paragraph-level was the right choice that would work for everyone.

It works fine if the paras. aren't too long or complex.
> What I can consider adding is "Sentence-Level: 0/1\n" PO header field,
> and deciding on that what separation level we want.  But, this
> complicates things a bit and I won't be able to work on that anytime
> soon.

It's a good idea, though.
> > I must admit, I struggled through three or four of the _shorter_ DIUG
> > files ... and haven't been back. The longer files just intimidate me.
> > If their strings were broken up (correctly) more, I would take them
> > on.
>
> Well, the idea is to compare translation through PO files with direct
> translation in XML files: we are going a step at a time :)

Yes, it's all new. I'll try and learn from it.

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