2009/4/10 Philip Olson <phi...@roshambo.org>: > Greetings doc geeks,
Hello Philip and everyone, > We need to improve our translations system for various reasons: (..) Agreed. No questions there :) and by the way, thank you for pushing for improvements on this area. > So we must change our process, but how? We have a few options: > > 1. Keep the current system, and simply change the revision handling > 2. The same as (1) but with a few other tweaks > 3. Totally rethink the system I think replacing the tools/workflow we use to handle the translations (whether we use .po files or not, etc.) is not that important at this moment. It's clear that there's a lot of room for improvement here, but the way I see it, there are a couple of more fundamental things to take care of before implementing new, better ways to manage the translations: a) As Philip mentions, the revision handling is a very basic thing that is taken for granted right now, but the time will come when we can't rely on CVS's automatic handling of $Revision$ strings anymore. This system could be emulated on different VCS using pre-commit hooks, which most if not all VCS software offer in one form or another. Or maybe we can come up with a new system, if it adds extra value to implement a new revision mechanism. I can't think of anything special in this regard, so right now I'd go for using the same style of rev numbers (1.XX), and just figuring out the way to keep using it on whatever VCS that comes along. b) Now, as far as CATs go, I know there are lots of options out there, some using .po as the format at the translation level, and interfacing with DocBook/XML, so the documentation team keeps working in the original format (phpbook). That's great and I've been looking at some of these tools, such as OmegaT, or Gnome's intltool, which could be used interchangeably by translators, along with any other tools people feel comfortable with, once our documentation tree is in the right shape. When I say "in the right shape", I'm talking about one of the things I know have been discussed several times before, but without a definitive conclusion (as far as I can recall, if that's not the case, please let me know). To properly use these external tools, we need to fix the doc tree first, so that every .xml is a valid, stand-alone document. I remember this being a hot topic in the days of livedocs, and whenever things like producing PDF files were mentioned, but as I said, I can't recall seeing a conclusive answer regarding this. However, I haven't been following the phpdoc list for some time, maybe this have been discussed some more and somebody has a plan? :) So that's my point of view. Once these two tasks are out of the way, I think then will be the time to discuss about new tools, CATs, .po files, and so on. Thanks, Leonardo B. Spanish translation team
