Translating manual pages [was Re: Migrate website translations to PO]
On 2010-08-11, Helge Kreutzmann wrote:
[...]
> And a final nitpick: Which translation teams do have the man power to
> do the conversion? The German team currently works on moving the
> text based translations of man pages to po based ones, and this turns
> out to be a huge effort. For the website, we at least know if a file
> is up to date, but I guess still quite some effort is required (or we
> hope that paragraph n in the original corresponds to paragraph n in
> the translation and mass convert without review).
Hallo Helge,
According to http://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-french/2006/05/msg00409.html
Thomas Huriaux and myself (IIRC Thomas did it almost alone) converted
1590 French manual pages into PO files during a single weekend, so
this operation does not require a large team. In fact, it depends
mostly on 2 factors:
a. Whether translations are correctly identified (ie. you know on
which version each page is based on, ideally all pages are based on
the same version of manpages)
b. And your ability to use po4a and gettext tools to speed up
gettextization; we played a lot with other manual pages (coreutils,
findutils, etc) before converting the manpages package.
If translations are not correctly identified, well you are out of
luck, but this is due to your current manual pages (maintenance is
almost impossible anyway) and not po4a. If you have trouble, you may
ask for advice on our development list about po4a
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/po4a-devel/
maybe some people there could help you with this process.
We imported a complete French translation of manpages 1.69, but this
version was 18 months old (and upstream made lots of changes at that
time), and we took about 4 months with a team of 6-7 translators to
synchronize with the Debian manpages package (2.39-1). After that,
maintenance became much easier, we have been able to keep up with
upstream manpages with a team of 2-3 people.
In January 2010 I launched a project based on the Debian manpages-fr
package to help translating those manual pages so that other languages
and/or other distributions can benefit from a centralized framework.
It will not help with converting your current pages to PO files, but
when this is done, you do not have to worry about importing new
manpages upstream releases, this will be done by myself and you only
have to care about your PO files.
Sources can be found at
http://gitorious.org/perkamon/man-pages
It is currently used only by French translators, but other languages
are welcome, it is a matter of changing only one line in a Makefile.
Denis
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