Manpages translation (was Re: debconf template translation)

[barbier@linuxfr.org (Denis Barbier)]

On Mon, Mar 03, 2003 at 10:34:06PM +0000, Mark Brown wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 03, 2003 at 09:59:14PM +0100, Denis Barbier wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 03, 2003 at 03:18:52PM +0100, Michael Piefel wrote:
> 
> > > The translator would have to look into the build process, create the
> > > *.x files and so on. I doubt that anyone has ever done this and
> > > approached the Debian maintainer or upstream with that.
> 
> > *This* is silly, translators only have to look at English man pages and
> > see if they are differences, as with any other man page.
> 
> I think you're missing the point there.  The upstream developers don't
> write manual pages by hand, they write manual pages by automatically
> processing the runtime help text included in the program.  When manual
> pages are generated using this system it is much more sensible for
> translators to do the same thing.

And my point is that they do not have to do the same thing: they can
generate English man pages and translate them like any other man page.

> If nothing else this will mean less work for the translators - only
> one set of documentation will need manual intervention.

Except that according to Michael, nobody did it yet.

Denis