Re: i18n issues, especially man pages
Hi,
On Sun, Sep 05, 2010 at 06:19:56PM +0100, Tony Houghton wrote:
> I've been sent a set of Spanish translations for roxterm, including the
> Docbook XML sources for the man pages, but I can't work out how to
> support internationalisation of these.
(Can't find any bug number for that)
> The first problem is that the translator tells me that the headings -
> "NAME", "SYNOPSIS", "AUTHOR" etc - which are generated by
> xmlto/xsltproc, didn't get translated. How can it be made to output
> localised versions?
The XML file needs to contain <book lang="en"> with en can be replaced
by the two-letter ISO code for the language.
Then docbook tools will use their internal translation from
/usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet/nwalsh/common/es.xml (in the case of
spanish).
Using po4a is recommended, as it uses translators work (gettext po files
can then be used to translate this XML files, translations
statistics/status, possibility to send translation calls...).
http://po4a.alioth.debian.org/
po4a is good documented, #po4a does exist, you can ask debian-i18n@ as
well.
> Then the man pages are installed by using automake's man_MANS target.
> automake doesn't seem to have any documentation about how to handle
> localised man pages though.
>
> Are both these issues solvable without installing large localisation
> packages for each target language? Ie will it be easy to build the
> package, including all translations, on mine and any user's PC, or would
> it be better to ask the translator(s) to provide all generated files as
> well as sources and package them separately?
Definitely, you should not use the generated files, but the source file
(either XML if this is the format used by the translator, or po file and
a build-dep on po4a in the better case).
In any case you will need build-deps again xml tools that enable the
build of manpages.
You cannot reasonably ask to translators to keep a translation up to
date from a groff code.
Best regards.
--
Simon Paillard
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