[PATCH] Support of PO files for translations
C. Michael Pilato
cmpilato at red-bean.com
Wed Sep 17 20:09:41 CDT 2008
Jens Seidel wrote:
> Hi,
>
> as announced long time ago I worked on proper PO file support for handling
> translations of the book. PO files are the standard way (see e.g.
> http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po/) in the Open Source community to work on
> translations and is used among others by Subversion.
>
> Currently all translations are based on XML files. This has many
> disadvantages:
> * Keep the files in sync with English ones is *very* hard
> * There is no standard way to specify the sync state against English files
> (needs to be extracted from svn log or maybe a comment, and is often wrong!)
> * There are from time to time build failures because tags where wrongly
> used in translations or not all XML files are in sync with the English ones
> * There are many long XML tags which need to be used in translations as well
> * If the translation is not yet fully updated after beeing 100% in the
> past old and new texts are mixed
> * Many (small) strings are repeated over and over again and need to be
> translated multiple times
> * It's not possible to add common translations for smaller phrases
> from an external message catalog
> * No way to get translation statistics
>
> Nearly all these disadvantages are solved by using PO files.
Jens, what is the state of the art with respect to XML-to-PO file generation
(and back)? It seems to me (and I admit ignorance on this topic) that there
are two steps to moving from today's scenario to a more ideal one where
translation teams need only upgrade PO files:
1. First, convert the existing XML into something "gettext-ized" I
don't know what this looks like, but maybe its:
<sect1 ...>
<title>_(Version Control with Subversion)</title>
<para>_(This is a sentence.)
_(This is another sentence.)
_(And a third!)</para>
</sect1>
Or maybe you do whole paragraphs at a time:
<sect1 ...>
<title>_(Version Control with Subversion)</title>
<para>_(This is a sentence. This is another sentence.
And a third!)</para>
</sect1>
And then use PO-generation and maintenance tools, just like the
Subversion source code does.
2. Secondly, you use automated tools to generate PO files from the
"gettext-ized" XML sources.
Is this right?
If so, then I'd like to know the options for that first step. Is it a
one-time operation that we'd perform and then the English authors would be
working in gettext-ized XML from now on? Or is it the kind of thing that,
say, a nightly cron job could generate from the current English XML sources
and commit nightly to the repository?
--
C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato at red-bean.com> | http://cmpilato.blogspot.com/
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