Translations by Skobelev Max

Table of content

1 Why should I use po4a? What is it good for?

2 How to use po4a?

HOWTO do all this in one program invocation?

This chapter gives you a brief overview of the po4a internals, so that you may feel more confident to help us maintaining and improving it. It may also help you understanding why it does not do what you expected, and how to solve your problems.

This chapter groups the Frequently Asked Questions. In fact, most of the questions for now could be formulated that way: "Why is it designed this way, and not that one?" If you think po4a isn't the right answer to documentation translation, you should consider reading this section. If it does not answer your question, please contact us on the E<lt>po4a-devel@lists.alioth.debian.orgE<gt> mailing list. We love feedback.

5 Specific notes about modules

This chapter presents the specificities of each module from the translator and original author's point of view. Read this to learn the syntax you will encounter when translating stuff in this module, or the rules you should follow in your original document to make translators' life easier.

Actually, this section is not really part of this document. Instead, it is placed in each module's documentation. This helps ensuring that the information is up to date by keeping the documentation and the code together.

Quite a few already :(

Why should I use po4a? What it is good for?

I like the idea of open-source software, making it possible for everybody to access to software and to their source code. But being French, I'm well aware that the licensing is not the only restriction to the openness of software: non-translated free software is useless for non-English speakers, and we still have some work to make it available to really everybody out there.

The problem to solve

Thanks to this, discovering which parts of the document were changed and need an update becomes very easy. Another good point is that the tools will make almost all the work when the structure of the original document gets fundamentally reorganized and when some chapters are moved around, merged or split. By extracting the text to translate from the document structure, it also keeps you away from the text formatting complexity and reduces your chances to get a broken document (even if it does not completely prevent you to do so).

Please also see the L<FAQ> below in this document for a more complete list of the advantages and disadvantages of this approach.

Supported formats

Currently, this approach has been successfully implemented to several kinds of text formatting formats:

nroff

pod

This is the Perl Online Documentation format. The language and extensions themselves are documented that way, as well as most of the existing Perl scripts. It makes easy to keep the documentation close to the actual code by embedding them both in the same file. It makes programmer life easier, but unfortunately, not the translator one.

sgml

others

fr.sgml original.sgml ---->--------+------>----------->-------+ | | | | V V { update of original } | | | | | +--<---<--+ V | | | original.new.sgml----->------->----+ V V | | [po4a-gettextize] +--->---->---+ | | | | V | | | | [po4a-updatepo] | | V ^ | V V original.pot | V | | | | fr.po | | | | (fuzzy) | | { translation } | | | | | ^ V V | | | {manual editing} | V V | | | | | | V V | | +--<--- fr.po addendum original.sgml +---->----+---->------->---> (up-to-date) (optional) (up-to-date) | | | v v v +------>-----+------<------+ | v [po4a-translate] | V fr.sgml (up-to-date)

Actually, as a translator, the only manual operation you have to do is the part marked {manual editing}. Yeah, I'm sorry, but po4a helps you translate. It does not translate anything for you...

This section presents the needed steps required to begin a new translation with po4a. The refinements involved in converting an existing project to this system are detailed in the relevant section.

To begin a new translation using po4a, you have to do the following steps:

-

$ po4a-gettextize -f <format> -m <master.doc> -p <translation.pot>

If you wish to learn more about this, you definitively need to refer to the gettext documentation, available in the B<gettext-doc> package.

Please refer to L<po4a-translate(1)> for more details.

$ po4a-updatepo -f <format> -m <new_original.doc> -p <existing.XX.po>

(Please refer to L<po4a-updatepo(1)> for more details)

position (mandatory)

endboundary (idem)

endboundary=</section>

If you want to add something after the following nroff section:

.SH "AUTHORS"

More detailed example

Input document --\ /---> Output document \ TransTractor:: / (translated) +-->-- parse() --------+ / \ Input po --------/ \---> Output po (extracted)

Gettextization: how does it work?

FAQ

*

<section> <title lang="en">My title</title> <title lang="fr">Mon titre</title>

gettext solves all those problems together.

poxml

po-debiandoc

AUTHORS

Denis Barbier <barbier,linuxfr.org> Martin Quinson (mquinson#debian.org)

DESCRIPTION