Translation Teams: A Request for Help
steveking
steveking at gmx.ch
Mon Jun 27 10:59:38 CDT 2005
Lübbe Onken wrote:
> C. Michael Pilato wrote:
>
>> Thanks, Steve! That's actually a pretty cool idea.
>>
>> Quick question, though -- I assume the granularity of a entry in the
>> bundle file is like ... a paragraph, or something. If so, do your
>> translators not find working with chunks of that size and that
>> particular file format unwieldy?
>
>
> Since I'm the guy who set up the TSVN translation process and takes care
> of the GUI and doc translations (besides translating German myself), I
> think I can tell you a few words about it.
>
> If you use tools like poEdit (multi platform) to work on the .po file
> it's not unwieldy. The .po format itself is kept away from the translator.
> * You can always look up the context of a paragraph.
> * You get some sanity checks for free.
> * You always know which paragraphs are outdated.
* it does automatic translations if only a few words changed in the
original (e.g. fixed spelling errors) so you don't have to translate the
whole string again.
> The only thing I find annoying are too long paragraphs (msgids). If the
> chunks are small, they are a lot easier to translate. A nice (bad)
> example is the help for 'svn st'. It's almost impossible to spot changes
> in the original without having a visual diff tool and the po Editor open
> side by side.
But that's true even if you translate the docbook xml files directly,
not just for the po file approach.
> xml2po plays nice most of the time. Only if you are using own entities
> (like &version; to get your version number everywhere into the docs),
> you can choose between hell and damnation.
> Since you don't want that entity to be expanded before creating the .pot
> file, because that would make existing translations obsolete, you
> extract the .pot file without expanding.
Again, that's also true if you translate the docbook xml files directly.
From my experience, even big paragraphs aren't really a problem when
translating. I even think it's a good approach to always translate a
whole paragraph and not just single sentences. I often find myself
rearranging sentences in the translation, just because it feels more
natural in the translated language.
Stefan
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