Translations (was Re: svn commit: r43974 - head/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/advanced-networking)

Tue Feb 18 09:14:56 UTC 2014

On 18 Feb 2014, at 06:19, Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 17 Feb 2014, Xin Li wrote:
> 
>> (redirecting to freebsd-doc@)
> 
> Subject changed.
> 
>> On 2/17/14, 7:10 PM, Warren Block wrote:
>>> 
>>> I'm sorry, these multiple whitespace changes were my fault due to
>>> a mixup with Allan Jude's original patch.  Normally, it would have
>>> been a single commit.
>>> 
>>> I apologize for this difficulty.
>> 
>> Well, please don't take it too personally :)
> 
> Thanks. :)
> 
>>> Would it help if these changes were reverted with a "reverse merge"
>>> of r43920, r43921, r43973, r43974, and r43975, then recommitted
>>> with the whitespace patches combined, or is it too late for that?
>> 
>> I think using a batch of commits instead of one big commit is
>> generally a good idea because the diff is easier to read/merge.  What
>> makes it hard to track is when the space changes are made in larger
>> timespan as they would be harder to ignore them or need more manual
>> intervention.
> 
> I think I understand.  Part of my difficulty is being monolingual, it's hard for me to see exactly what translators do.  Benedict has explained it to me, but it sounds so difficult to track changes that it's hard to believe anyone can keep up with it.
> 
> (Oh, and if those changes need to be reverted, let's do that as soon as possible.)

The main part that we do for nl_NL is that we diff the English version from
the revision that our current workset is based upon, to a defined workset
later in time. (For my project at work I set the revision to work towards
in stone to keep it manageable). that means you will get a svn diff r1:r2 $file
(like svn diff -r 40588:43328 en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/basics/chapter.xml )

That gives a lot of output that we need to parse through; style and whitespace
changes increase the amount of changes we need to read through. A space or tab
(or EOL character) is a change that we need to spot -> more of those changes ->
more work to get the content in sync again.

My project at work is not able to keep up with the ‘content spree’ that Dru is
doing to make things better. Good work, but a drama for translation teams that
need to be in sync first (and with a train that moves so fast, it will remain
out of date).

> 
>>> If there is any way I or other committers can make this easier for
>>> translators, please post on the -doc mailing list or to me
>>> invididually.
>> 
>> One thing I would recommend is to separate the contents that do not
>> need translation (e.g. tags, entities, etc.) and contents that needs
>> translation.  This way, these contents would serve as a positioning
>> blocks when merging from upstream (English).
> 
> That sounds interesting, and leads well into the next part:

Afair we do not translate those for nl_NL unless it is really needed.
I think that the normal English version for those kind of things is really
what we need ;)

> 
>>> We are also trying to modernize the translation process, and
>>> automate some of the work that translators are currently forced to
>>> do.  Anyone who would like to help with that is welcome.
>> 
>> That would be great!  How can we help, or is there some kind of TODO list?
> 
> There are several things that would be helpful.
> 
> We could use help from people who are experienced with using the .po/.pot/.mo tools (gettext) on other platforms.
> 
> The basic process is to separate all the content from the markup automatically.  Then an editor can be used to add translations, and the tool puts a translated file back together from it.  This allows the translation program to remember existing translations, so translating one document helps translate others.
> 
> textproc/itstool is one of the automatic separator programs.  I've been somewhat stymied trying to figure out how to get the Python libxml2 implementation used by it to find FreeBSD documentation XML catalogs. Documentation on this is... let's just say sparse.
> 
> The PC-BSD folks are using tools like Pootle, but not for DocBook (as far as I know).  They have a web site for translation, useful as an example of what can be done: http://pootle.pcbsd.org/
> 
> Benedict (CCed) has made some progress with some of these tools.  I think there are plans to add a page to the wiki, but don't know if it is present yet.

Do note that translating strings of text might have a dramatic result; especially
in non english versions, one translation might fit the one line but the other line
wouldn’t fit. Although ofcourse this sounds interesting there is much more to it.
(we do not have a set of predefined things we mention like $_[LANG] = “The bird
flew over the house”; which is used once or perhaps twice. We have ‘rolling’ content
like a book.

Cheers
Remko

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