CM policy for for svnbook 1.5 translations

Johans Marvin Taboada Villca jmt4b04d4v at gmail.com
Wed Sep 17 23:50:29 CDT 2008


I wasn't completely aware until now...

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 7:46 PM, Jens Seidel <jensseidel at users.sf.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 03:18:53PM -0400, Johans Marvin Taboada Villca wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 9:57 AM, Jens Seidel <jensseidel at users.sf.net> wrote:
>> First and promising alternative PO files, get_text and the like:
>>
>> > Using PO files it would be trivial to support multiple versions of the
>> > book. This would of course require more strings to be translated but it
>> > is no problem of the infrastructure.
>>
>> Clearly leans to maintain current structure and suggest that a bunch
>> of localized PO files be maintained side by side, its a cleaner
>> (although hardly) solution for the current status. The only
>> restriction that imposes is that Win**** committers doesn't have the
>> necessary tools to work (correct me if I'm wrong). I had same
>
> Ah, forget these. If they are unable to use free software they should not
> complain.

I can't when I'm in the same bag (sadly I admit), besides I'm pretty
sure it was a valid issue when someone was supposed to validate XML
sources before committing, that might have been the reason of many
automated build failures in the past, something that wouldn't occur
using PO files.

> They are still free to translate an ordinary (PO) text file
> and could rely on a central server to check automatically built documents
> from their translation. One doesn't need a lot of tools, e text editor
> is sufficient. Optional: gettext is provided by cygwin, po4a is based on
> Perl which is available as well, ...
> (PS: Your argument applies to any programming task as well, there is not
> a single tool in the Windows environment (except maybe wordpad :-) for
> any kind of programming, ...)

Ok you have a good point here, I didn't count Cygwin. Although I'd
rather Notepad++ or Programmer's Notepad, there is plenty of Free
Software for Win**** luckily.

> There was never any problem up to now and I know a lot of projects using
> similar workflows. At all I'm sure the documents watched by me cover at
> least 5 000 English pages.
>
> * Debian Installation Guide, http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/
>  PO based translations: el fi hu ja ko nn pt ro ru
>  sv tl vi zh_CN zh_TW
>  140 pages
> * Debian Release Notes,
>  http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/releasenotes
>  PO based translations: fi ja pl pt ro ru sv vi zh_CN zh_TW
>  55 pages
> * Debian Developer's Reference,
>  http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/
>  PO based translations: fr ja
>  approx. 100 pages
> * The book Debian Reference started using PO as well (I translated
>  in the past SGML files, today I would use PO)

Then it's a proven method, and your examples show that translations
started with XML sources and evolved to PO files.

+1 to PO files.

> And do you see any specific trouble using PO, would prefer other tools, or
> do you want to continue with XML (I doubt this after reading your mail)

I'm not against PO, it would be great to learn something new. I just
feel a little nostalgic about dropping away previous translation
efforts, and a little frightened about restarting from the beginning.
But maybe it's time to leave the past behind and look at the future.

To start again with the right foot can be a promising decision right now.
----------------------------------------
Johans Marvin Taboada Villca
-`^_^´- .oO(2007-04-24, Kimberly 1 año )
http://softwarelibre.org.bo/jmtaboadav
http://ajayu.memi.umss.edu.bo/jmtaboadav
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