Re: Shadow's manpages translation
On Mon, Mar 28, 2005 at 09:25:43AM +0200, Helge Kreutzmann wrote:
> Hello,
> On Sat, Mar 26, 2005 at 06:53:28PM +0100, Nicolas François wrote:
> > It seems that some German man pages are not the translations of the
> > current English man pages. Can you have a look at it, and see if they
> > need an update?
>
> Many german man pages are *not* the translation of the original
> english ones. Some appear to be written from scratch, even, and include
> reference to german only resources. This probably was done with good
> intentions, but, as you point out, has some unfortunate consequences:
>
> > The -s options is not documented.
>
> > The options are not documented
> > The current German translation is far smaller.
>
> So people reading only the german man pages would miss functionality
> or, even worse, would refer to outdated version (e.g., options
> changed).
This is the case of many translations. I have no problem with
"translations" written from scratch because they can help users who don't
speak English, even if they are not complete or describe some old
behavior.
Updating the translations take a long time. When time is an issue, just
warning that there is a more up-to-date document written in English can be
a solution.
Sometime, the translation is so different from the real behavior of the
program that it should be dropped (I'm not speaking of just a missing
option). The goal of my mail was also to have the opinion of German
people (ich spreche sehr schlecht deutsch).
> > Can you provide an update as a bug to the shadow package, or indicate if
> > the man page is so outdated that it should be dropped (if it will mislead
> > users), or just add an indication that German users can read the more
> > up-to-date English man page with "man -L C <...>".
>
> Joey, I think this would be a good idea, if we went through the german
> man pages and added a *prominent* note into all man pages which are
> not a current translation.
*Hint* You can also add a note indicating they can help updating the
translation, or part of it.
> This would not only help users, who could,
> if in doubt, refer to the english original, but also help translators
> who could quickly figure out if a man page needs updating.
>
> Nicolas: How do you handle updates in french? Do you think it would be
> feasible to set up some kind of database (e.g., hash values) of
> upstream man pages, and whenever this hash values changes by a new
> upload, some tool could determine that the translation become
> outdated?
Man pages translation updates are performed the same way program
translation updates are:
* update the PO
* translate new strings / unfuzzy modified ones
With po4a, an additional step is needed for the generation of the
translated document (on the contrary to program, the translation is not
performed at run-time, but at compile time, so that translated man pages
can be distributed).
With a po4a configuration file, this is performed this way:
run 'po4a shadow.conf'
this updates the POT file, fuzzy strings in the French PO, and generate
new translated document (but untranslated/fuzzy strings are kept in
English)
manually edit the translation with your preferred PO tool
run 'po4a shadow.conf' again
this will regenerate the translated man pages
If you choose to use po4a, please contact me, because there is a way to
reuse the existing translation (this may save you a lot of time).
> > The French translation was handled with po4a, which permits to translate
> > the man pages using a PO file, and permits to ease future updates of the
> > translation). You can have a look at the man/fr directory in the shadow
> > source package. If you want to use po4a, don't hesitate to mail me for
> > any question you have (e.g. I can prepare you the po4a conf file, provide
> > the POT file, and fill it with the current translation).
>
> Do you propagate po4a to upstream, i.e., would other languages benefit
> from it as well, or is this an internal tool within the french
> translation team?
The po4a directory was put in the fr directory in order to get a less
intrusive patch and have more change to get it included. If other
languages are using po4a, then it would be better to have it in the man
directory, with the translated man pages generated in the fr, de, etc.
directories.
The new upstream developer, Tomasz Kloczko, is Polish, and I think l10n
aware.
The goal is to synchronize after Sarge.
Cheers,
--
Nekral
Reply to: