Re: Migrate website translations to PO [was: Re: When and how can we migrate out of CVS and WML ?]
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Le 06/08/2010 17:23, Gerfried Fuchs a écrit :
> Hi!
>
> * Andrei Popescu <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> [2010-08-05 09:17:59 CEST]:
>> On Vi, 30 iul 10, 11:15:17, Andrei Popescu wrote:
>>>
>>> Moving to .po probably needs a coordinated effort including at least the
>>> coordinators from all the languages that have more than just a few
>>> translated pages.
>>>
>>> Is there some wiki page about this project? I can start one, but not
>>> until tomorrow.
>>
>> It took a bit longer, but the page is
>> http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWebsitePO
>>
>> Input from people familiar with po4a and (other) translators would be
>> highly needed.
>
> While some translators are familiar with working on po files I see some
> issues that bother me myself when working on po files:
Thanks for your remarks, I'll try to answer some of them. Even if, as a
translator, I'm convinced that PO files is a nice tool to handle
translations, especially updates, I wonder if this question of migrating
the translation of the website to PO files shouldn't be asked to
translators, in order to have their feedback, thus CCing debian-i18n.
Please continue the discussion on debian-www.
> Often parts aren't properly in context, moved around within the po file
> and get confusing when only working on the po file. If done carefully
> this might be solved but it is something that shouldn't be ignored for
> proper decision making.
I fail to understand the issue here : when working on a blank WML file,
there is no context at all, the only context is in the original file,
which needs to be used when translating a WML file, and can also be used
when working on a PO file.
> This is related to that po is for translating more-or-less text
> snippets that are meant to be able to stand on their own. Having a text
> seperated into multiple strings, with always the english part in between
> does IMHO block some quality possibilities of having the text flow
> naturally because it doesn't make the final proofreading as easy.
On the contrary, providing the original text while asking for review
makes it easier for reviewer to understand what it is about (and
eventually spot translation mistakes), without needing them to search
for the ad-hoc part of the original text somewhere on the website.
> Also, translating longer paragraphs gets annoying, especially when the
> original gets changed. It will mark the string as fuzzy and the
> translator has to dig around in a longer paragraph about what actually
> has changed. One solution to this might be the --previous switch which
> keeps the former string in there for comparison -- but are there
> translation tools that support that properly and can hilight the changes
> in a wdiff form? Maybe I missed some development in that area, feel free
> to enlighten me. As long as such a tool isn't available I consider that
> as a real issue.
It's one of the feature of Lokalize, don't know if it is implemented in
other tools, but yes: Lokalize provide a colored diff inline between the
old original text and the new one, and make it easy to spot what has
been changed on the paragraph.
> The last issue I see is with the the core way how po works: If it finds
> an untranslated or fuzzy string it will put the english original into
> the place. This might be something useful for applications to specificly
> support work-in-progress approaches and not render a translation invalid
> for a string that might only be an error message or such - but then I
> don't consider this as an acceptable approach for the website. It would
> be quite confusing for people to see a mix of english and their own
> language on the same page and switch like from every paragraph to the
> next. I *do* consider it better in that cases to have a potential
> (minorly) outdated page but completely in the native language than a mix
> of english and their language.
It might be possible to trick the usual PO workflow, by keeping the
generated WML file in VCS, and update it if and only if the translator
updates the PO file.
Anyway, even if I understand the "please keep fully (even outdated)
translated pages" argument, I don't think it applies to the whole site.
For example, I think it would be better if developers' related stuff
would be kept up to date, even if not the whole page is translated
(rationale: developers needs to interact in English anyway, even if
translated documentation is helpful, up to date documentation is more
important).
> Also, in some areas we do encourage adding language specific
> information - I'm not too sure how that should work with po4a. Also, in
> some specific situations it happened that translators have changed the
> formating of a page (like seperating/merging two paragraphs) and it
> might make sense for them to keep that possibility. Different languages
> do have different representation requirements.
Actually po4a can handle addendum, which is a nice way to add some more
information (it is often used to add translator credits for example).
> I would like to know how this approach would like to tackle those.
>
> Thanks!
> Rhonda
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