[Gtranslator-devel] Re: gtranslator and OmegaT

[Ross Golder <ross golder org>]

See comments in-line.

On อ., 2003-06-10 at 10:50, Marc Prior wrote:
> Can you perhaps answer any of the following:
> 
> - Do rigid procedures exist for translation of GNOME documentation, or can 
> translators simply take files in the relevant format (presumably DocBook) and 
> use any desired application (and, for that matter, platform) to translate 
> them provided they are returned in the same format)?
> - Are the translation projects managed centrally (in which case who is 
> responsible for them?), or are the different language teams left largely to 
> their own devices?

These questions would be better put to the gnome-i18n gnome org mailing
list, which is where all the language translation projects are
'co-ordinated' (centrally managed ;). I think your assumptions are
fairly close to the truth.

> - From your message, I infer that gtranslator is used exclusively for .po 
> files. Are there any plans to adopt it for the translation of documentation, 
> as well as application interfaces? (The KDE teams, I believe, also use kbabel 
> for documentation.)

I don't personally have any plans in this area. It's specifically a tool
for editing '.po' files, and due to it's design, it can also deal with
other formats designed to store translation information (e.g. UMTF,
TMX). If you want to maintain a completely different class of file, such
as Docbook or XML, you should use a completely different type of
application.

> - From the gtranslator web pages, I found "compendia", which I presume are 
> translation memory repositories, for Turkish and Lithuanian. Are these the 
> only languages for which anything of this kind exists?

I haven't come across these yet, so I can't really comment. I would
anticipate that eventually, each GNOME language project will maintain a
'master glossary' or something, which would form the basis of a
translator's learn buffer. Much of the po files would be
auto-translated, then the translator could go over the messages
hand-editting any that were badly guessed, using the glossary in some
way as a reference (e.g. when a word has multiple potential
translations).

> - I notice that gtranslator uses an internal XML format, UMTF, but that TMX 
> support is planned. Is this still on the cards, and if so, what form will it 
> take? Will gtranslator be able in future to read external TMX files? Would a 
> UMTF <-> TMX converter be useful?

I have briefly touched the UMTF format, and as yet not looked into TMX.
>From what I understand so far, they do essentially the same job, but use
a slightly different schema. Transformation between the two should
therefore be fairly trivial, using a couple of XSLT stylesheets, and
libxslt.

> - Does gtranslator employ any form of fuzzy matching?

Yes, it maintains a 'fuzzy' status for each message in the po file.

Hope this helps,

--
Ross