[Po4a-devel] Bug#594831: debian-faq: Please, add po4a support

Tue Aug 31 21:42:24 UTC 2010

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[Keeping the DDP mailing list CCed, and add the po4a developer list if
someone wants to correct me or add other hints, don't hesitate to ask
directly on po4a-devel of you have any problem.]

Le 31/08/2010 14:54, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña a écrit :
> On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 08:38:08PM -0400, David Prévot wrote:
>> Please find attach a short patch in order to permit this, at least
>> for the French translation. Note that this patch doesn't force to
>> use a PO files for every languages, and no Makefile will need to
>> be edited if another language decide to use a PO file as well.
> 
> Thanks for the patch, it is very welcome. Switching to the use of po4a is one
> of the things I want to do with all the documentation I maintain in the DDP.

Great, I'm willing to help you in this task if you want, this remarks
applies to others documentations as well.

With Simon Paillard, we were considering to provide a template Makefile
in order to give the opportunity to have something a bit unified for the
DDP, but we also think it would be great to switch from DebianDoc to
DocBook XML (I'm not sure which one needs to be done first,  probably
provide a template Makefile DocBook XML ready and a method to switch
from DebianDoc would be the best thing to do).

>> The French translation is currently beeing updated using PO file,
>> so if noone speaks against, it will be applied in the Subversion
>> repository with the up to date French translation.
> 
> What tools are you using to convert the current SGML sources to PO for
> French? Is there an automatic tool that helps a little bit with this?

There is no full automatic tool to do that, but there are lots of hints
in the “HOWTO convert a pre-existing translation to po4a?” part of po4a(7).

> I would
> like to switch other languages too and I would appreciate some help there
> too.

I believe that this works needs to be done by a translator (it doesn't
need to be done directly by the translator of the document, but a
knowledge of the language translated is really helpful), since there is
a need to “adjust” the translated or original document in order to
perform the initial “gettextization”.

I just gave some more hints on the debian-l10n-french mailing list in
order to do so, may I try to translate this piece of advice here. A wiki
page may be a good place to publish it if it could be of any help (I'm
willing to edit the page, but please, give me a hint of *where* in the
wiki it should be written, I'm still a bit lost there), or even the
po4a(7) manual page (but I'm less sure: there is already a lot of
information in it, and po4a is not debian-specific).

*HOWTO perform gettextization on DDP*

1- Update each original page of the local repository to the version
present on the header of the translated document, it usually looks like
  “”
and then proceed to the initial “gettextization” as explained in po4a(7)
(implies some local changes to the original or translated documentation
in order to do so, keeping those changes will be helpful for the two
last step, using “svn diff” on the translated directories might be enough).

2- Once the PO file obtained for this non up-to-date translation,
perform an automatic unfuzzy. The strings will need to be checked by the
translator, but this task can be done later:
  msgattrib --clear-fuzzy file-step1.po -o file-step2.po

3- Update the original version of the documentation on the local
directory (“svn update”), and update the PO file using “po4a-updatepo”.
The PO file obtained is ready for translation update. This file can then
be sent to the official translator of the document if the three first
step were performed by someone else (eventually provide the result of
“svn diff” obtained in stage 1: sometimes the translation is a bit in
advance on its own header, so the translator may pick back what he has
already translated but was not included in the PO file).

4- Put back addenda, which are mainly used for translator credits, or
language specific stuff, and eventually provide a po4a patch for the
package if it is not yet available (which was the initial goal of this
bug report).

Cheers

David

P.-S.: Please note that some translators prefers to work using the
current workflow (using svn to provide diff of the original translation
and edit directly a translated document) rather than editing a PO file.
Unless every translator of a document are willing to use PO files (e.g.
developers-reference), it's probably best to let translator choose his
own method: it's not a problem since both method can cohabit (e.g.
maint-guide or debian-history).

P.-P.-S.: The French translation for the debian-faq was not too much
outdated, after the third stage, the PO file had the following
statistics: 951t11f10u. I think Simon (the actual translator) agrees
that it would be easier to maintain than around fifteen independent
files currently needed to build the debian-faq.

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