GC Concept Guide Review

[Cristian Marchi]

Yes Christian,
I've created a single po file with the corrisponding Italian translation 
of the C/guide files. Back when I translated this files (about 2 years 
ago) in Italian I remember I translated them paragraph by paragraph 
(except some additions or subtractions). Using the command "xml2po -e -o 
it.po -r it_IT/gnucash-guide.xml C/gnucash-guide.xml" on the same 
revision checkout I got the po file with the translation. Then I went 
through this po file to track the shifting of sentences and remove or 
add a paragraph in the corrisponding xml file in order to re-sync the 
two translations. I've done this process until the end of the po file 
and now I've a po file with the translation synced with the C locale for 
GnuCash Tutorial and Concepts guide. (That operation is done only one time)

I'm contributing Italian translation for Xfce from about a couple of 
years and all the applications help is provided in po format and I think 
it works really well. I've also some feedback of people that read 
through the Italian GnuCash help and found it really useful although it 
is almost a paragraph-to-paragraph translation of the English version.

You are right saying that some arguments may differ from country to 
country but I think that these are only a small part of all the 
documentation (at least for Italian in comparison with C locale). Keep 
also in mind that all the descriptions of options, commands, and in 
general GUI, are the same for all languages and these are a big part of 
both the help documents. Same apply to tutorials.

What for me is a big advantage is on the mantainability side. Instead of 
browsing through all revisions to find out what changed and which is the 
latest version, I just have to issue two commands ("xml2po -e -o 
guide.pot C/gnucash-guide.xml" and "msgmerge -o it.new.po it.old.po 
guide.pot") and I'll get a po file with fuzzy or untranslated messages 
where something has been updated or added in the xml files from my 
latest revision.

When you convert back your po file into xml, no one stops you from 
adapting the xml files to your liking by adding, expanding or removing 
contents. But, you always have your original po file to track the 
changes upstream in a optimized way. And if you created a patch of the 
changes you made on the localized documentation against the synced one, 
you could, with a little effort, reapply it to the updated documentation 
from po file.

Time will tell, but at the moment, without having experimented deeply 
with this method, I see in the "po-way" a powerful method to maintain 
the Italian translation of GnuCash help and guide.

Regards
Cristian

Il 15/10/2010 23:48, Christian Stimming ha scritto:
> Dear Cristian,
>
>    
>> From: Cristian Marchi [mailto:cri79 at libero.it]
>> Sent: Friday, October 15, 2010 8:17 AM
>> To: Thomas Bullock
>> Cc: gnucash-devel gnucash
>> Subject: Re: GC Concept Guide Review
>>
>> Thanks for the file. Really usefull and complete. It is perfect for a wiki
>> page. (I will surely follow the bugzilla section because I'm not familiar
>> with it) I've also managed to get a po file where I merged the C locale
>> guide to the it_IT locale. In this way I'm able to use a po file to track
>> changes between the two in an easy way and the translation process is a
>> lot better.
>>      
> Do you really try to translate the guide (or help) documents by converting
> them from xml to a po file, then back to xml? IMHO this sounds like a not-so-
> optimal approach, simply because your translated document will very often be
> significantly different from the original document (e.g. different paragraphs
> or section grouping). A translation of a text document and in particular one
> about the country-specific issues like accounting does not have to stick to
> the original document on a sentence-by-sentence basis. IMHO the po file is
> only meaningful if you intend to do a sentence-by-sentence translation, but
> for the text documents this would limit your potential for a good translation.
> Which experience did you encounter so far with po file and text documents?
>
> Thanks for all contributions!
>
> Regards,
>
> Christian
> .
>
>