Re: About translating documents (.xml/.sgml) in GNOME

[Keld Jørn Simonsen <keld dkuug dk>]

On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 01:48:09AM +0100, Kjartan Maraas wrote:
> tor, 2003-01-30 kl. 01:07 skrev Malcolm Tredinnick:
> 
> [snip intro]
> 
> > This might be a good opportunity to float another approach to this
> > problem. I looked at DV and Jonathans' work last year and I didn't think
> > it entirely met the requirements we might have. So I sat down and wrote
> > out a specification of what might be in such a tool (a documentation
> > version of intltool, essentially).
> > 
> Has anyone compared this to po2xml from the KDE side? Or any other
> approaches? I know Red Hat have made the transition for some of their
> docs, but I'm not sure what tool they're using to do this. Would be nice
> to draw on existing code if possible. I also think Sun has tools to do
> this kind of stuff, but they're probably not available to the general
> public. Still they're surely one of the best sources of input on what to
> put in a spec like this if they've been using tools like this for some
> time.

Also google must have some software to do the translations of all
the webpages.

There is an open source project "po files for all" that also deals
with this issue - po4a is the project name.

> > I have attached a fairly different approach to the problem from Simos'
> > which I would appreciate some feedback on. My main problem is that I am
> > not a translator, so while I have tried to incorporate what I see as the
> > main issues, there may be things I don't realise just because I don't
> > speak Norwegian or something like that.
> > 
> Norwegian is a very simple language with a fairly reasonable amount of
> quirks, so I'll let the others chime in here. ;-)

And Norwegian is a very easy language, even 3-year olds can speak it
perfectly:-)

> > As an aside, one of the motivations of this approach was to also make it
> > easy to translate websites without requiring special markup in the HTML.
> > 
> > I have code for some of the following (mostly extracting the strings for
> > translation and constructing something that is pretty close to a valid
> > .po file). If people cannot shoot too many holes in my method I will
> > continue down this path, although that does not help Simos with his
> > immediate problem of translating _now_.
> >
> > Probably I should point out that the main problem I see in Simos'
> > approach is that you will get a lost of unnecessary stuff in the .po
> > file, which looks like it will interfere with smooth translations. Also,
> > I could not see how some of the "issues to be resolved" were addresses
> > by that code (to be fair, the authors mentioned at the time that it was
> > a prototype of an idea).
> 
> I think it's _very_ nice to see that this work is being picked up again.
> Beer on me next time.

Yes, I think this is very important technology to bring to the Gnome project.

Kind regards
Keld