[Po4a-devel] IUF Rulebook translation

[Felix Dietze]

Hi Denis,

Thanks a lot for your ideas. I need to do some research now.
I also wrote the same mail to the pootle mailing list. Let's see what they
have to say.

Felix


On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 5:04 PM, D. Barbier <bouzim at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 2012/11/8 Felix Dietze wrote:
> > Dear po4a team,
> >
> > I'd like to renew the workflow of the rulebook of the international
> > unicycling federation. It's a big document (~100 pages) with competition
> > rules for unicycling. It is constantly changing, because the sport is
> very
> > young and developed a lot. Sadly there is no space for experimental rules
> > that need to be tested first.
> >
> > Right now it is written in MSWord, passed around by email and the
> > translations are not coordinated very well. This worked out for the last
> 10
> > years, but I think today we can do much better.
> >
> > How I think it should work:
> > - Many people should be able to write differnt parts of the document at
> the
> > same time
> > - People need to know what changed at which time, so we need version
> control
> > - There should be versions with experimental rulesets for testing
> > competitions
> >   - If an experimental rule works out, it can be merged into the master
> > document
> > - The translation should be done collaboratively by the community
> > - people should be able to view the current versions (including
> > translations) online and/or print them
> > - If a change to a master/experimental document is made, the translation
> > system is automatically updated, so that the community can start to
> > translate changes immediately. (No regular admin interaction)
> >
> > Here are my ideas so far:
> > - Rewrite the whole thing in LaTeX (can render to HTML or PDF)
> > - Put it in a git repository and manage experimental versions as branches
> > - With every commit render the pdf and html versions.
> > - Translate it (and also the experimental branches) collaboratively with
> > po4a and Pootle and also render the translated documents automatically
> >
> > I think this could solve the issue. But before we start to work I want to
> > know if this is the right approach. Latex and git are no problem. But for
> > the translation I'm not sure.
> >
> > With a new commit in git, we could trigger a po4a-updatepo for the
> changed
> > latex files in every branch. But is it possible to automatically reinject
> > them into Pootle? How do the translations flow back from Pootle to the
> build
> > system. If a new language is set up in Pootle, how does it create new
> > documents? Can we do version control for the languages to be able to jump
> > back to an older version of a document with proper translation?
> >
> > I guess you can answer these questions easily and support us to set this
> up
> > properly.
> [...]
>
> Hallo Felix,
>
> This is very interesting, po4a has been designed for this task; as
> translators, we were bored with having to look at diffs in original
> documentation, and wanted instead a system which can keep track of
> changes automatically.
> I do not know if some people on this list know enough Pootle to answer
> your questions, you should contact the Pootle developers, they are
> very nice people.
>
> You did not write it, but it is clear that your document will be
> splitted into many files.  Granularity is up to you, for instance by
> section or subsection.  Translators will translate each file
> separately.
>
> Having a stable branch and a development branch is not a problem per
> se, but here you may have several experimental branches at the same
> time, translators will have to track all branches, maybe they will not
> feel comfortable with that.  Another option is to have only one
> branch, and use specific macros to include the desired experimental
> rulesets.  This is very easy with DocBook XML, but is doable with
> LaTeX too.  In order to help translators focus on the main rules, you
> should write experimental rules in separate files with a common prefix
> (and include them conditionally in your document) so that translators
> know from the filename if this is an experimental rule or not.
>
> Like Jonas, I wonder whether LaTeX is the best choice, maybe you could
> test a single page with different formats and find the most suitable
> for your writers and translators.  Maybe you will eventually choose a
> format which is supported by Pootle without the need of po4a, that is
> not a problem ;-)
>
> Apart from these minor points, your approach looks fully right.
>
> Feel free to ask here more questions if you want, but Pootle
> developers should be much more helpful than us with respect to Pootle
> usage.
>
> Denis
>
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