Quoting Jens Seidel (jensseidel@users.sf.net): > It's more or less the task of a translator to create/fine-tune the > infrastructure. If you write an English book why should you learn about > PO files you will never need? Just one day you will recieve a > translation, add it to revision control and ship it but that's all. > > Maybe some translators also prefer other formats ... This happens, yes. For instance, for the Installation Manual, a few translators preferred sticking up with the XML-based format. I personnally see this as an error because it doesn't attract more help. One person is certainly enough to maintain the Installation Manual translation up-to-date....but not using PO certainly does not encourage sharing the load. PO is something fairly easy to learn for new people and, even if in the case of big documents, keeping the context is important from one paragraph to another, I think that documents using gettext are still easier to translate and less prone to errors than raw documents. This is exactly what happens with the French l10n (sorry for taking fr as example, again, this is the one I best know). Philippe Batailler does a tremendous job keeping the translation of the installation manual up-to-date, but nearly never got any help...and the translation is mostly unreviewed (I did a review once, for Etch). I consider this as a weakness. He doesn't agree and as he is the translator, it would have been a suicide to enforce a switch to PO if he doesn't agree....even though I consider that this would be a benefit in the long term. (Philippe had some technical objections for what I consider minor points: I think these issues were adressed but, still, the switch to PO didn't happen).
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