Re: PO-based Documentation Translation

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

fre 2003-09-26 klockan 23.03 skrev Andrew W. Nosenko:
> :  This, of course, is a matter of choice: if most translators feel that
> : PO format is what they need, we should start thinking about moving to
> : it.  But I see many problems with this, and not enough benefits.
> 
> I'm totally agree.
> 
> `1 English paragraph <-> n Russian paragraphs' are no big deal yet.  But
> what to do with `n English paragraph <-> 1 Russian paragraph' relation?

I don't see how this (n English paragraphs -> 1 translated paragraph)
would be common.
In writing docs, one typically wants to be generous (but of course not
too much) with separating different parts of the text into different
paragraphs, so as to not creating too big and massive text blocks that
are hard to read. This is true for English as well as other languages,
so I don't see why one would often need to join several seperate English
paragraphs into one in the translated version. On the contrary, to me it
seems one would be doing something bad when doing so in general, since
the separated paragraphs are almost always there for a reason.


> Or with documentation analogs of 
>     printf("<bold>%s</bold>%s", _("No"), _("preview available"));
> ???
> 
> Sorry and excuse me, but *many* of English speaking peoples merely
> don't understand, what another languages are exist, and rules of these
> languages may be *very* different from English.  And as example -- this
> my e-mail.  I'm sure that my sentences are understandable (may be), but
> totally wrong in grammatically sense for English.

With the example you give above, the correct thing to do would be to
report the bug, the same way as we do when such brokeness occur in
application messages. It's no different in that respect.

But I must say that I'm strongly convinced we won't see much of such
brokeness in the docs translation. Our documentation writers in the GDP
are not only good at English but also highly skilled technical writers.
And a big part of being that is being able to both write so that people
understand, *and* being able to write texts that can easily be
translated into other languages. In fact, the GDP already has
substantial advise in their style guide for how to write docs so that
they can be easily translated:

http://developer.gnome.org/documents/style-guide/locale.html
http://developer.gnome.org/documents/style-guide/locale-5.html
http://developer.gnome.org/documents/style-guide/locale-6.html

Given this, I suspect the documentation writers are even better suited
to be translation friendly in their texts and messages than the average
application programmer. :-)


Christian