Hello Denis,
I'm not doing this myself, but I CC'ed our coordinator for the German
man page project.
On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 02:16:16AM +0200, Denis Barbier wrote:
> 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).
>
> 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)
Well, in the past man pages varied from partial translations, over
outdated translations to several rewrites. In early Linux time it
seemed (at least for German) like a good idea to take part of standard
linux volumes and distribute it as man pages, ignoring maintenance and
the original versions (I did not watch it at that time, this is my
impression, still). So each man page has to be considered if some
parts can be reused or not.
> 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.
From my experience, this Toddy is able to do. For coreutils man pages
are generated (and hence translated) help2man, so I'm not sure what
you mean with them.
> 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.
I never intended to blame po4a, I explicitly stated that maintance is
clear for the website. Until recently, man page maintenance was a big
unsolved puzzle for the German team. There is a reason I submitted
#493007.
And thank you very much for the offer!
> 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.
This is the reason for our switch as well. Once the basic ground is
covered, we can maintain them much more easily. Just that we cannot
start with a completed, clearly defined set.
> 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.
This sounds interesting, especially given that we just started.
> 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.
I guess we shall discuss this on debian-l10n-german (depending if our
current maintainer sees value in switching the framwork).
And thank you very much for the efforts on getting a generalized
system going.
Greetings
Helge
--
Dr. Helge Kreutzmann debian@helgefjell.de
Dipl.-Phys. http://www.helgefjell.de/debian.php
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