translation HowTo - is there such an animal

Øyvind A. Holm sunny at sunbase.org
Wed Jul 13 05:49:11 CDT 2005


On 2005-07-12 12:47:21 Lorenz wrote:
> Greetings to all the busy book authors and translators,
>
> I'm in the course of figure out, if I'm able and willing to 
> participate in translating "The Book" into German.

Hi, welcome to the gang. :) And thank you for participating.

> In the meanwhile I am trying to figure out what I need to get started.

Basically, just a regular text editor which preferrably can understand 
UTF-8. The book also need some scheme to follow, especially if several 
translators are going to work on the translation. Some basic system to 
avoid stepping on each other toes is needed, and you also have to decide 
how to keep the translation synchronised against the English master 
version.

There is also a web page for the svnbook which should be translated into 
the various languages. All those files are located in www/ and you just 
create your own index.de.html file and update the links in the other 
HTML files as needed.

> I's not the process of compiling the xml files (as described in 
> http://svn.red-bean.com/svnbook/trunk/src/en/README), but the

Are you able to make test builds of the files before you commit, or do 
you have some kind of XML validation system? XML is pretty easy to 
break, and there is this rule about never breaking trunk builds.

>      "how to edit xml files on windows without spending
>       money or getting involved with emacs/vim"

I have only used Vim the latest years, but there should be some nice 
free editors around. What platform are you using?

>      "how to format the source, so that
>       updating from trunk/en is still possible"
>
> questions that occupy me.
>
> I searched the repository and the mailing list, but could not find any 
> in depth information regarding this topics.
>
> Could some of the people that are working on the other translations 
> please compile some information about their setup and mode of 
> operation?

To keep things updated, I had to use some homegrown system, but it 
happens to work quite well. I have documented how it works in 
src/nb/METHOD, maybe that’s a system that you can use. If you want to 
merge changes from the English version, I suppose it’s necessary to keep 
the English text in the files somehow, to make it easier to verify the 
translation — the English text is kept together with the translation, 
and it also makes it possible to merge changes from the English version. 
I suppose it’s also possible to note the revision number the translation 
started, replace the English text and then make the necessary changes by 
looking at diffs. Given the activity in the original book, I think this 
could be quite tedious and difficult. There was also mentioned a 
"xml2po"-project which uses .po files when translating XML files, but 
I’m not sure how it works. You can read about it at 
http://red-bean.com/pipermail/svnbook-dev/2005-June/000762.html , 
though.

> Perhaps this sort of information (including the README) could be 
> collected in the trunc of the repositiory, so that interested people 
> can find it easily.

Yep. Some introduction to the project and how a translation system can 
be set up to decrease the amount of new wheel inventions.

Regards,
Øyvind A. Holm
-- 
#!/bin/bash
for f in 1 2 3; do
  PREF=http://musthave.sunbase.org/Stallman/stallman${f}c
  wget $PREF.sub ; mplayer -cache 8192 -sub stallman${f}c.sub $PREF.mpeg
done



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