Hello LinuxCNC people, there's a possible change brewing that I'd like
to ask for your feedback on.
The translations of our documentation into non-English languages has
been handled in an unusual and cumbersome way, and a new developer has
suggested a plan to modernize and streamline things.
How things are now:
* All our documentation is maintained in Asciidoc format in the git
repo, and built into HTML and PDF by the build system.
* The "main" documentation is maintained in English.
* To create a new translation, a translator copies the asciidoc source
of the English documentation to a new language-specific asciidoc source
file. For example: `README.adoc` -> `README_fr.adoc`. They edit the
new file and translate the words.
That's it! Simple, but it has a couple of problems...
Problems with the current system:
* If the English-speaking developers change the main documentation file
there is no automatic process to notify the translators, and the
translated docs slowly drift out of date with the main English docs,
without us really knowing.
* The translations of the docs are handled differently than the
translations of the software. The translations of the strings in the
software is done using a widely used system called "gettext", which has
a suite of tools to identify translatable strings in programs and
maintain a database of what those strings should look like in different
languages. You can learn more about gettext here:
<https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#Why>
The new proposal is basically to use gettext for everything, both the
software and the documentation. This would be done using a system
called po4a: <https://po4a.org/>
Moving the docs translations to po4a would let us use the standard
gettext tools, including online tools like Weblate, to maintain the
translations. gettext keeps track of what "main" english strings have
changed, and flags the translations of those strings as "out of date",
so that translators know they need attention. Out-of-date translations
automatically fall back to using the up-to-date english strings.
I'm not very experienced with translations, so I'm asking for comments
from the folks who currently do the work of translating LinuxCNC (both
docs & software) into non-English languages...
Do you have any concerns, input, or comments on this proposal?
Would you be willing to verify and update the translations into your
languages?
What can we software people do to help make this task easier?
Thanks!
--
Sebastian Kuzminsky
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