Greetings to the entire LinuxCNC community. Translations ........... the worst nightmare. During the translation of documentation from English to Spanish in which I worked last year I found many problems that were difficult to solve. Example: the documentation of modules generated with halcompile.
But I don't think that's the root problem. My thought is that there are no clear guidelines for both programmers and translators. Documentation translation is not a trivial job. The number of factors to consider is large; from the use of correct English by the editor of the original documentation to a minimum knowledge of the subject by the translator. GNU, KDE, or GNOME may have a lot of the work done: - https://translationproject.org - live.gnome.org/TranslationProject - live.gnome.org/TranslationProject I suggest analyzing how they are doing before making decisions. Thanks! El lun, 8 nov 2021 a las 20:41, Sebastian Kuzminsky (<s...@highlab.com>) escribió: > Hello LinuxCNC people, there's a possible change brewing that I'd like > to ask for your feedback on. > > The translations of our documentation into non-English languages has > been handled in an unusual and cumbersome way, and a new developer has > suggested a plan to modernize and streamline things. > > > How things are now: > > * All our documentation is maintained in Asciidoc format in the git > repo, and built into HTML and PDF by the build system. > > * The "main" documentation is maintained in English. > > * To create a new translation, a translator copies the asciidoc source > of the English documentation to a new language-specific asciidoc source > file. For example: `README.adoc` -> `README_fr.adoc`. They edit the > new file and translate the words. > > That's it! Simple, but it has a couple of problems... > > > Problems with the current system: > > * If the English-speaking developers change the main documentation file > there is no automatic process to notify the translators, and the > translated docs slowly drift out of date with the main English docs, > without us really knowing. > > * The translations of the docs are handled differently than the > translations of the software. The translations of the strings in the > software is done using a widely used system called "gettext", which has > a suite of tools to identify translatable strings in programs and > maintain a database of what those strings should look like in different > languages. You can learn more about gettext here: > <https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#Why> > > > The new proposal is basically to use gettext for everything, both the > software and the documentation. This would be done using a system > called po4a: <https://po4a.org/> > > Moving the docs translations to po4a would let us use the standard > gettext tools, including online tools like Weblate, to maintain the > translations. gettext keeps track of what "main" english strings have > changed, and flags the translations of those strings as "out of date", > so that translators know they need attention. Out-of-date translations > automatically fall back to using the up-to-date english strings. > > I'm not very experienced with translations, so I'm asking for comments > from the folks who currently do the work of translating LinuxCNC (both > docs & software) into non-English languages... > > Do you have any concerns, input, or comments on this proposal? > > Would you be willing to verify and update the translations into your > languages? > > What can we software people do to help make this task easier? > > > Thanks! > > > -- > Sebastian Kuzminsky > > > _______________________________________________ > Emc-developers mailing list > Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers > _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
