IIRC, last year Christian Leutloff (hi!) proposed a mechanism for this based on a so-called "skeleton". It should be in the debian-doc mail archive.
It more or less comes down to the following: Each section of a document contains such a skeleton (using appropriate SGML entities) outlining all the important information including figures, examples, tables, etc. The author of a partiular (part of a) document for a particular language uses the skeleton for writing the actual text in that language. This means we only have to maintain these skeletons in a central place, and let the (team of) language author(s) worry about the exact wording. Thanks, Ardo Adam Di Carlo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "James A. Treacy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Is there any mechanism in place for handling translations of Debian > > documentation? I believe all the documentation is in CVS which is a > > good start. We need to also set up CVS for any group that wishes to > > translate documentation. > > The Debiandoc Project is ahead of the curve on that count, since we > already manage all documentation that we can in CVS (on > cvs.debian.org). > > > Additionally, when there are multiple translations on a web site it > > is much easier if the files are served using content > > negotiation. This means that html files must have names in the > > following format: <file>.<lang>.html Links from the main page could > > explicitly point to pages in that language, but again, it is better > > if links simply state <file> as this allows for partial translations > > (if a file is not available in the preferred language, then the > > english doc is served). > > > Can our current SGML system support something like this? If not, > > how hard would it be to improve it? > > To be honest, I'm not completely clear on how we could extend our SGML > system to accomodate multi-linguistic documentation and document > maintenance. > > Ideally we should separate the Language Independant version of a > document from the Lanugage Specific elements. Based on an initial > assumption that all documentation under the purview of the DDP is > Debiandoc-SGML, this is going to require us to pretty deeply carve up > the Debiandoc DTD, I fear. > > An example of a full system to manage a document, focusing on > "synopticism", i.e., keeping multi-linguistic documents up to date at > all time, can be found in the article, "The Addition of a Multilingual > Component to an Existing Document Processing System", > <URL:http://www.sgmltech.com/papers/multilingual.htm>. > > > Currently there is a random set of translations of Debian > > documentation on the web page. As they don't follow any guidelines, > > it is difficult to mix them in with the english versions. Simply > > renaming files is not the solution as this will break all the > > links. Clearly we need a better solution. > > Yes, I think we need a system which is fully integrated with our SGML > processing and version control system. Even if it means we have a bit > of up-front work ahead of us. > > At the simplest, we could use SGML conditionals, in conjunction with > some sugar in debiandoc2*... > > > The Debian web pages themselves are a different story. Every > > language that so desires can have their own source directory in > > which they can translate pages. Now that an annoying bug in apache > > has been found, it works quite well. > > The problem with that scheme, for me, is that there is no "intra-page" > sharing of information. I.e., if I have a chart of Debian archive > directory structure, this has to be "cut-n-pasted" between language > versions. -- Ardo van Rangelrooij home email: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] home page: http://www.tip.nl/users/ardo.van.rangelrooij PGP fp: 3B 1F 21 72 00 5C 3A 73 7F 72 DF D9 90 78 47 F9
