Using entities in translations

Warren Block wblock at wonkity.com
Fri Jul 17 18:35:56 UTC 2015


Seen on the DocBook mailing lists: a Fedora document that shows how 
using entities in translations can go wrong:

https://jfearn.fedorapeople.org/en-US/Publican/4.0/html/Users_Guide/chap-Publican-Users_Guide-Creating_a_document.html#sect-Publican-Users_Guide-Entities_and_translation

An example there for using "Fedora" translated into a sentence in 
Czech shows seven different forms.  Only one if them is actually 
"Fedora".

The same situation applies to us.  &os; is converted to "FreeBSD" when 
our documents are rendered, but in many situations it will be wrong.

So for most translations, we are probably better off just expanding 
entities.  In general terms, that is probably the right way to go for 
all languages.


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