Updating translation workflow

[Ganbold Tsagaankhuu]

On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 1:07 AM, Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:

> We have some problems with our translation workflow, and updating it could
> make life easier for everyone.  Note that as an American, I barely speak
> English, so there may be misconceptions in the following.  Please correct
> me if necessary.
>
> * Translators work too hard.  No automation, no assistance from the
>   computer to see what needs to be translated,


Maybe it depends from language. But translation is usually manual and needs
lots of hard work.



> no reuse of
>   previously-translated terms.  Because of this, updating translations
>   after the English version changes can take a long time.
>

In my case hard part is when English version has lots of small word changes
or not so much meaningful word changes like "the" etc. In some cases
sentence meaning could be the same as previously translated one. Plus
whitespace changes makes me look through every lines. Specially it was case
when Dru went through all the chapters of handbook. Big documentation
change is mostly hard for translators.



>
> * Few new translators are willing to work that hard, so we are missing
>   up-to-date translations to several important world languages.
>

True.


>
> * Separating whitespace and content patches makes it more difficult for
>   writers to edit existing English documents.
>

Whitespace change with content change is terrible.


>
> The current workflow, such as it is, is very, very old.  Since it was
> created, new ways to translate have come about.  PC-BSD is using Pootle
> (textproc/pootle, http://pootle.translatehouse.**org/<http://pootle.translatehouse.org/>)
> for their documentation: http://pootle.pcbsd.org/


Just saw it, seems they use .po files similar to gnome etc if I'm not
mistaken. But I guess translation of messages or some GUI
thing is different than whole sentences like in handbook.

>
>
> I think we can use a combination of tools to work with our existing
> documents.  The workflow would be like this:
>
> 1. Use textproc/itstool to create a "strings to be translated" file
>    (.pot) from an XML file.
>
> 2. Use pootle as a database to translate any of those strings that have
>    not already been translated.
>
> 3. Use itstool to merge the translated strings back into the XML file.
>
>
I'm not quite sure here when we are putting back strings I guess we have to
check again the meaning of the sentence.



> 4. Build the translated document (DocBook or XHTML) as normal.
>
> The first difficulty I've found is that itstool does not like entities. It
> could be modified to accept them, but probably the more correct procedure
> for translations is to expand them before using itstool.  This would be
> more correct for translations, as it's been explained to me, because some
> languages modify nouns depending on how they are used.  (In other words,
> our use of entities can be English-centric.)
>
> Is there an easy way to expand entities?
>


What if we can have some rules for English documentation change?
For instance maybe limitation of changes in doc for one commit per day etc.
I know English version needs to be updated very frequently and always needs
modifications, improvements etc. However if we can have some limitation of
changes (I mean small changes like maybe couple of hundred lines that
translators can follow immediately with ease) then it would be much easier
for translators and that would maybe help new translators join. Like asking
them to work on small changes and review if necessary.

And of course automated tools would be nice addition to it.

thanks for understanding,

Ganbold



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