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Some observations regarding manpage translations



Hello fellow manpage translators,
I made some observations when watching the French updates which I
would like to share with you. Please kindly disregard them if they are
obvious, done on purpose or do not apply; I'm not speaking French and
I'm not involved in any discussion regarding French translation, hence
these observations might be totally not applicable.

Without further ado:

1. After completing a translation, it is quite helpful to reformat it,
   either before committing or in a second commit. This has two
   benefits: 
   a) If there are any syntax errors, you immediately spot this.
   b) Further scripts do not touch the file simply for reformatting,
      making the "git diff" better to read.

2. If a translation has been proofread, it is usually quite helpful to
   immediately (after reformatting) add it to the compendium 
   (../use-for-compendium.sh manx/foo.x.po)
   and then update all translations
   ../update-translations.sh
   Before committing, "git diff" is quite helpful.

   This has two benefits:
   a) In many cases, other man page translations (fuzzy strings, missing
      strings) are updated as well, easing the work and bringing more
      pages over 80% (and thus the translations to users).
   b) This is an extra check; in my recent updates I noticed errors
      when performing these steps, especially during the final "git diff",
      which I corrected, even though I do not speak French. 

3. I'm not sure about your systematics, but I do notice that quite a
   few man pages are close to complete or close to reach the 80%
   threshhold. Once they are at 80% they are shipped to users. Of
   course, sometimes you do not want them to be shipped (unless 100%),
   maybe because of problematic strings, so this might be deliberate.
   However, when prioritizing, looking at 
   https://manpages-l10n-team.pages.debian.net/manpages-l10n/debian-unstable-fr.html
   (and similarly for all other distros like Arch, Fedora, ...) you
   can notice that several man pages just lack one or two strings to
   reach 80% (and using the compendium, see 2., the number of these
   pages maybe reduced even further). 

   I regularly build all man pages and provide you a list of all pages
   between 70%-79% below. In case you would like to receive this list
   regularly, I can try to set this up (but the web listing above
   should cover this nicely as well). 

4. Check for similar strings or easy unfuzzy after upstream updates.
   When looking at French pages, I often noticed that there were quite
   a few strings which are trivially to handle. Sometimes upstream
   just removed or added spaces after full stops, corrected a link or
   a typo ... 
   Another example from today: wget.1.po was checked in today,
   unfortunately not completely translated. However, one missing
   string was just a typo away from an already translated string and
   others were trivially to handle (e.g. version numbers), so I could
   almost complete the part of OpenSUES Leap as well, even without
   French knowledge.

I noticed (and sometimes handled) similiar issues in the past as well, 
but doing this more systematically of course requires some time. And
since I don't speak French, I can only perform trivial updates and some 
easy fixes (if I knew French), i.e. "low hanging fruits" I have to
skip.

I hope the above might give you some ideas how to improve the quality
and number of translated pages into French; again, if any (or all) of
this is not applicable, please ignore.

Greetings

             Helge

Here is the current list (as of this morning) of pages which are close
to reach 80%:
argz_add.3
basename.3
blkdiscard.8
capabilities.7
core.5
ctime.3
daemon.3
drand48_r.3
dumpe2fs.8
ecvt.3
envz_add.3
filesystems.5
finite.3
fnmatch.3
fsck.minix.8
fsfreeze.8
fstrim.8
ftw.3
getauxval.3
getcontext.3
getfsent.3
getgrent_r.3
gethostbyname.3
getlogin.3
getmntent.3
getnetent.3
getprotoent.3
getpwent_r.3
getservent.3
host.conf.5
intro.5
isosize.8
j0.3
kill.1
ldattach.8
libblkid.3
locale.5
lseek64.3
mbstowcs.3
mem.4
mke2fs.8
mke2fs.conf.5
mkfs.8
mkfs.minix.8
motd.5
nfsidmap.5
openpty.3
pacman-conf.8
pivot_root.8
popen.3
pow10.3
pthread_create.3
ptsname.3
qecvt.3
random.3
rcmd.3
regex.3
resize2fs.8
rtnetlink.3
securetty.5
setarch.8
setnetgrent.3
setterm.1
sigprocmask.2
sigsetops.3
sk98lin.4
splice.2
statfs.2
statvfs.3
syslog.2
syslog.3
system.3
tcp.7
timegm.3
timer_create.2
timerfd_create.2
ttyname.3
tune2fs.8
undocumented.3
vmsplice.2
wait.2
wait4.2
wdctl.8
write.2
zdump.8


-- 
      Dr. Helge Kreutzmann                     debian@helgefjell.de
           Dipl.-Phys.                   http://www.helgefjell.de/debian.php
        64bit GNU powered                     gpg signed mail preferred
           éelp keep free software "libre": http://www.ffii.de/

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