2009/6/12 Repke de Vries <[email protected]>: > Hi all > > at some point in last Wednesday's Webinar [1] the question was > brought up if DocBook documents could be output in such a way that it > becomes Evergreen Help texts. The answer was: yes, this can be done. > > This of-course would help consistency across external documentation > (manuals, what have you) and Evergreen internal documentation = Help > Texts, enormously. > > From an internationalisation perspective my question is: would this > also be possible the other way around ? > > We know that translation of menu structures and help texts is > underway (like Armenian and Russian) and if we could export and feed > back into DocBook easily, this could kick start core translated > external documentation.
That's a whole lot trickier. A crude approach would be to rely on the same entities defined in the DTDs for portions of the OPAC / Staff client in the DocBook, but it would make the process of creating and processing the DocBook more complex (I believe XInclude is the preferred approach, entities are passé nowadays). Depending on the context in which the entities were used, it could also cause difficulties (for example, just adding an "s" to the end of an entity to make it plural in the English source would not work terribly well in many other languages). However, loading the strings into a translation management application like POEdit or Pootle that suggests translations based on fuzzy matches could be useful. Something like po4a (http://po4a.alioth.debian.org/features.php) appears to hit that use case relatively well; one could treat the documentation as just another set of PO strings to translate along with the interface labels / menus, etc. Which is a roundabout way of getting to where you were headed, I think. That said, I haven't touched po4a, so I don't know how trustworthy it is in roundtripping DocBook to PO to DocBook. Also, translating the strings out of context of the DocBook elements might introduce its own challenges. But it's certainly worth a look. -- Dan Scott Laurentian University _______________________________________________ OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION mailing list [email protected] http://list.georgialibraries.org/mailman/listinfo/open-ils-documentation
