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26.
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Quite a few already :(
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type: textblock
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(no translation yet)
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Located in
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27.
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Why should I use po4a? What it is good for?
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type: =head1
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(no translation yet)
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Located in
doc/po4a.7.pod:84
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28.
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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.
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(no translation yet)
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Located in
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29.
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The perception of this situation by the open-source actors did dramatically improve recently. We, as translators, won the first battle and convinced everybody of the translations' importance. But unfortunately, it was the easy part. Now, we have to do the job and actually translate all this stuff.
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(no translation yet)
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Located in
doc/po4a.7.pod:93
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30.
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Actually, open-source software themselves benefit of a rather decent level of translation, thanks to the wonderful gettext tool suite. It is able to extract the strings to translate from the program, present a uniform format to translators, and then use the result of their works at run time to display translated messages to the user.
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(no translation yet)
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Located in
doc/po4a.7.pod:98
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31.
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But the situation is rather different when it comes to documentation. Too often, the translated documentation is not visible enough (not distributed as a part of the program), only partial, or not up to date. This last situation is by far the worst possible one. Outdated translation can reveal worse than no translation at all to the users by describing old program behavior which are not in use anymore.
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type: textblock
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(no translation yet)
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Located in
doc/po4a.7.pod:104
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32.
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The problem to solve
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type: =head2
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(no translation yet)
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Located in
doc/po4a.7.pod:111
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33.
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Translating documentation is not very difficult in itself. Texts are far longer than the messages of the program and thus take longer to be achieved, but no technical skill is really needed to do so. The difficult part comes when you have to maintain your work. Detecting which parts did change and need to be updated is very difficult, error-prone and highly unpleasant. I guess that this explains why so much translated documentation out there are outdated.
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type: textblock
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(no translation yet)
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Located in
doc/po4a.7.pod:113
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34.
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The po4a answers
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type: =head2
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(no translation yet)
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Located in
doc/po4a.7.pod:121
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35.
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So, the whole point of po4a is to make the documentation translation I<maintainable>. The idea is to reuse the gettext methodology to this new field. Like in gettext, texts are extracted from their original locations in order to be presented in a uniform format to the translators. The classical gettext tools help them updating their works when a new release of the original comes out. But to the difference of the classical gettext model, the translations are then re-injected in the structure of the original document so that they can be processed and distributed just like the English version.
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type: textblock
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(no translation yet)
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Located in
doc/po4a.7.pod:123
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