Re: [l10n] Manual translation issues
On Tue, Sep 14, 2004 at 09:05:52PM +0200, Frans Pop wrote:
> Recently it was also suggested (in the d-doc maillist) that po4a will become
> available, but maybe it does not yet have support for SGML.
I've tried po4a just now - it's unusable for the manual in the current
state, as it expects a master document, trying to get the other ones
itself. This doesn't work as expected.
> - - The preface.xml is not handled correctly by xml2pot: from the <preface>
> tag down it is _not_ included in the .pot (attached) and in the .nl.po.
> I think this also explains why the first pages of the ru translation are
> incomplete.
> I guess this should be repported as a bug upstream.
I'm not that sure about that. We all know that these files are
"incomplete" XMLs, i.e. not well-formed as they are merely included, but a
good XML parser will choke on preface.xml. The source code for poxml
hasn't been updated in months, I guess we can assume it's sane and not
dead. Trying to run xmllint on preface.pot, I get the following (among
"missing entity" errors):
preface.xml:35: parser error : Extra content at the end of the document
<preface>
So I guess if xmllint doesn't like "extra content" - that means that the
document is not enclosed in any tag, which is rather unusual, I suppose -
then there is no reason a good XML parser should do that either. Can we
restructure that one somehow? Split in two, for example, this would solve
the problem.
> - - xml2pot replaces some text by fairly unreadable codes where the real text
> to be translated tends go get lost. See for example the <informalexample>
> table in module/partman.pot (attached).
Sorry, I do not see any significant difference to what is in the xml
file. If you are talking about all the "\n"s in there, these are not a big
problem, as they are a necessary artifact ;)
> - - When using split2po, the structure of the original and the translation
> must be completely equal. Although that is not an error, it is something
> to watch out for when converting. I had three files (that I know of) where
> the .nl.po was generated incorrectly by split2po:
> - preface.xml: I had added a <para> in the Dutch .xml explaning that the
> translation is Work in progress;
Shouldn't this be a conditional <para> in every translation, which would
get disabled on some occasion?
<BTW>
There is some arch-dependant mess in buildone.sh (at least in SVN) which
should be best split out of there and updated. At least the kernel
versions are not right.
</BTW>
> - boot-new/boot-new.xml: I had chosen not to translate one particular
> <para>;
You commented it out, right? The choice not to translate something would
still be yours ;)
> - administrivia/contributors.xml: I had resorted the languages in Dutch.
I think this is actually the task of the appropriate xsl-stylesheet, if
I'm not mistaken. However, my xsl experience and knowledge is very
rudimentary.
> So, all in all, IMHO we are not ready to move all existing translations to
> .pot. I _do_ think that we should look into this seriously post-sarge.
Are the "big structural changes" coming to the manual soon, or is it
almost finalized? I though, I've seen mentioning of boot-floppies
somewhere...
--
Nikolai Prokoschenko
nikolai@prokoschenko.de / Jabber: pronik@jabber.org
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