[Padre-dev] localizing plugin documentation

[Cezary Morga]

Dnia czwartek, 30 kwietnia 2009, Adam Kennedy napisał:
> I think the main point of gettext (and correct me if I'm wrong here,
> since I don't do any translating) is that robust tools already exist
> that track and manage change, and (I assume) do diff-like things for
> you in the translation tools?
>
> And we get all this tooling for free if we use gettext.

gettext is great for relatively short messages, GUI elements etc. Not so great 
when it comes to such a monstrous documentation as 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ for example.

I'm not aware of any tool that could be anywhere close to being useful when 
translating documentation. As far as I know, in all Open Source translation 
efforts I've participated the standard procedure went somewhere like this:
 * keep in some place within the translated document an Id number of original 
document revision this translation is based on.
 * cvs/svn diff between the above Id revision number and most current version
 * find in your translated document appropriate fragment and update 
translation
 * update Id number
 * commit

We could try to devise couple of scripts that would take POD file, gettext-ify 
it by paragraphs for example (dividing it into smaller chunks could make 
translation more prone to errors as you could lose the context) and turn 
translated thing into regular POD at the end.

Not very elegant but it's just an idea.

-- 
Pozdrawiam,
Cezary Morga
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." (Benjamin 
Disraeli)