On Fri, 12 May 2006, Marco Ciampa wrote:
On Fri, May 12, 2006 at 11:23:23AM +0200, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
On Fri, 12 May 2006, Marco Ciampa wrote:
On Thu, May 11, 2006 at 03:33:02PM +0200, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
I think the po2xml is just used to translate the program strings which
appear in the docs (used to refer to button captions etc), not for the
actual
documentation text.
Wrong. It is used for documentation writing too as you can see here,
for the LinuxFromScratch manual:
http://www.mail-archive.com/lfs-dev@linuxfromscratch.org/msg06863.html
In that case, I understand even less why they use it. In my opinion,
the .po format is totally unsuitable for this kind of thing.
Sorry, I do not understand and I really want to see your point.
Could you please tell me why you consider .po files not suitable for the
job?
I do not know of some other tool able to manage the update problem of a
multilingual translation as the gettext tool. May be I'm wrong but I
think that such a tool simply does not exist!
.po files are designed/meant for captions, short one-line descriptions to be
displayed in a program, produced by gettext from sources.
Gettext uses a very inefficient algorithm for translation: it searches
in the .po (or .mo) file for the original text, and then returns the
translated text. You can't get more inefficient than that.
Conclusion:
The .po format is not designed/meant for large pieces of continuous text.
I agree with you that a good tool for translations does not exist.
The question is whether such a tool should exist. A simple diff
(with nice gui) in any text editor can help you in keeping your
translation up to date just as much...
There is no need to use a .po file format for this.
How would you translate a document written in Latex, or Ms-Word or
OpenOffice Writer? There are no good tools for this, and I don't
believe it's possible to write such a tool other than some visual
aid for detecting differences...
For example:
The fpdoc format is much more suitable for translation, because all
pieces of text are identified with unique names. It would be much more
easy to write a translator program for that.
Michael.
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