Re: PO-based Documentation Translation

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Mon, 2003-09-29 at 08:38, Åsmund Skjæveland wrote:
> > > Why reinvent the wheel? KDE already has a working system for translating
> > > DocBook documentation using PO files. Why not use that?
> > > 
> > > http://i18n.kde.org/translation-howto/doc-translation.html
> > 
> > I know about it.
> > 
> > The problem with that solution is that you need QT (Perhaps they solved
> > that already, I will look at it when I get some spare time).
> 
> Why is QT a problem?

The number of requirements was one problem. I had to download the whole
kdesdk (or whatever it was called) package at a minimum just to see the
source code. Plus all the dependencies to build it, etc (kdecore, at
least was required). Requiring at least a minimal KDE install to do
GNOME translations when we can do something similar with libxml2 and
glib is not something I am happy with. This is on eof the cases where I
have to say "I am using GNOME, not KDE", so I need a new tool.

Also, when I looked at the KDE tool back in March, it did not seem to do
everything we wanted (as far as I could see from our design discussions
ont his list). Some things that I remember

        - it did not factor out repetitive strings (like the contents of
        a <guimenu> element) and then put a placeholder into complete
        sentences that contain this string.
        
        - it did not handle general entities in a particularly
        intelligent way (translate the entity once and leave the entity
        reference in place; treat the entity as possible XML markup and
        strip any tags that are not needed for translation context).
        
I don't think I looked at the handling of external entities or XIncluded
files, but the documentation that you point to seems to only talk about
single files, so that's an unknown issue for me at the moment. One of my
design goals, is that if the source document consists of multiple files,
then the translated version should be in one-to-one correspondence.

I assume split2po can run separately from KBabel, etc, so the GUI aspect
is not really an issue.

Just my memories of what I did a while ago. I am not about to download
all the code again and repeat the process, since it's many megabytes and
I'm on a modem at home.

Cheers,
Malcolm