Install Manual, and thoughts on SGML stuff for translators
On Wed, 16 Dec 1998 10:49:27 -0200 (EDT), Eduardo Marcel Macan <macan@debian.org> said:
> Guys, I am announcing this at debian-devel and then will start
> a discussion at Debian i18n.
> I am interested upon internationalization and I am beginning
> to work on it. I am going to try out some customizations and
> summarise the problems and concerns I find in order to make a
> coherent list of tasks to be addressed.
> As a warm up I am going to make a Portuguese (Brazilian)
> version of the Install disks, work on more apropriate keymaps and
> environment settings for my language, contribute translations to the
> gnome team (I got addicted to gnome :) and as a final goal look into
> package description translations.
Hey, I wanted to make a connection between you two, Eduardo and Jose.
Both have offered to do Portuguese translations, so I thought you two
should work together.
> As a result I expect to gain enough experience to make a
> serious proposal about internationalization in Debian and have a
> list of features that we have or need to implement a good
> internationalization schema.
Let me ramble for a second, just in case you're looking at translating
the Install Manual.
First off, I'm still hacking up the Install Manual pretty deeply, so
it might be best to wait until Feb 1 to start translating that, but I
don't know translator workflow too well.
Second off there's a whole issue of using debiandoc-sgml in the
context of multilinguistic documents. I guess, optimally, all the
langauge specific stuff for the Install Manual and other docs are
integrated in the upstream locations (i.e., cvs or whatever).
I have some code which walks down SGML groves and can pick out
structure and emit it. I.e., you could basically emit a skeleton of
an SGML document. I don't know if this would be helpful or not; since
it uses groves it can't capture entities or docuemnt preambles (i.e.,
SGML features which might be used in language-independant ways).
Still, the document could be postprocessed to capture these.
Basically, the whole point is to make life easier for translators. Is
multi-linguistic SGML, integrated in upstream sources, the way to go?
If so, how does debiandoc-sgml have to be modified to support
multi-linguistic documents? What infrastructure can we put in place
to help translators start translations? What infrastructure can we
put in place to help translators keep translations up to date
(synopticism)? I'd like the perspective of actual translators. I.e.,
I'm just an SGML geek, uni-linguistic (well, some German).
Note: there was a conversation about this on debian-doc in December, I
think. You might be interested to check the archives.
Please CC me on any replies, as I'm not on this list.
--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
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