Hi Guys,
LONG POST, HERE'S THE SUMMARY:
I've attached a patch against r864 that is a proof-of-concept for using poxml
to
handle translations of the manual and tutorial. Translations will then be kept
in GNU gettext *.po files, which are update-able for incremental translations.
I've just discovered XLIFF, and am looking to see if it's a better solution...
but I wanted to put this out there for discussion/review.
DETAILS:
With our UI, we've had pretty good success (IMHO) using Qt's translation system
to get various translations of the interface. I think we have about 13
translations of H2's interface (including english).
On the other hand, the *manual* has 5 translations and the tutorial has 3. The
process of updating the manual and keeping the translations updated is
cumbersome, tedious, and error-prone. The translations we have are not even
synchronized -- and it's hard to know *how* out of date they are.
Therefore I propose we go to a translation system for the manuals, and I
propose
we use poxml from the KDE SDK. [1] poxml breaks up DocBook XML documents and
converts them to GNU gettext *.po files. The PO files can be edited with any
translation software that supports PO files (e.g. KBabel).
This requires using DocBook XML instead of DocBook SGML. I could not find
anything that worked with DocBook SGML.
I've attached a proof-of-concept patch... however, it's against rev 864. (Just
before any manual updates happened.) To get HTML, do this:
$ make manual.html manual.es.html manual.fr.html
(Don't just do 'make' or 'make all' because the other translations will fail.)
To see what happens when you update... make a small change to manual.docbook
and
re-run the 'make manual.html manual.es.html manual.fr.html' and see what
happens.
Plusses: * Use DocBook XML instead of SGML (UTF-8 files, no more è
or ü)
* Translation process very similar to using Qt's Linguist
* No more *manually* trying to synchronize the translations.
Minuses: * Qt's Linguist doesn't support *.PO files... but there's several
similar programs that do (e.g. KBabel).
* The *.po files will have XML markup in them -- but they are
not XML files. So, output translations will need to be validated
after every update.
Alternatives: XLIFF is a good alternative, but I don't know of any full-stack
F/OSS solutions for docbook -> xliff -> docbook. However, Qt Linguist supports
XLIFF, and it is inherently XML.
Peace,
Gabriel
[1] I looked around, and not only is this a good option -- it looks like the
*only* free option. Other options include XLIFF or some special markup (ITS)
provided by W3C. However, poxml is the only full-stack solution I know of (so
far).
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