Re: translations of documentation

[Adam Di Carlo <apharris@burrito.onshore.com>]

In article <[🔎] 87pvapuhha.fsf@flevonet.nl>, Ardo van Rangelrooij <avrangel@flevonet.nl> writes:
> IIRC, last year Christian Leutloff (hi!) proposed a mechanism for
> this based on a so-called "skeleton".  It should be in the
> debian-doc mail archive.

> It more or less comes down to the following: Each section of a
> document contains such a skeleton (using appropriate SGML entities)
> outlining all the important information including figures, examples,
> tables, etc.  The author of a partiular (part of a) document for a
> particular language uses the skeleton for writing the actual text in
> that language.  This means we only have to maintain these skeletons
> in a central place, and let the (team of) language author(s) worry
> about the exact wording.

Hmm.  I don't really get it -- I guess I'd like to see an example.
What I was thinking was using SGML conditionals, i.e., 

<![ %LANG_EN [
  The information is here.
]]>

<![ %LANG_DE [
  Die Information ist heir.
]]>

Kinda icky, I guess.

I think the requirements are:

  * ability to do basic versioning, i.e., translators know which sections 
    need to be retranslated (synopticism)

  * ability to have 'non-translatable' sections, not needing translation

  * ability to break out different languages in different files (?)

  * ability to emit the different language versions of the document
    into properly named files (i.e., index.html.de I think)

--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>