RFC: How to translate help topics.

[John Arbash Meinel]

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> Advantage of text file over gettext is translaters can focus
> translating one topic. And we can history with bzr.
> 
> Advantage of gettext is traceablity on changes in English document.
> Splitting help topic per paragraph helps translaters to follow
> changes in English.
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 

I like the idea of having a full text file, but the most important thing
is how do translators *want* to do the translations. Many people seem to
like Rosetta (Launchpad's interface), but that seems mostly tuned for
translating a UI (small clumps of text, 1-sentence, maybe 1-paragraph,
not a document).

help-topics are meant to be a discussion about something. As such, I
think breaking them into single sentences would lead to a disjointed
view. (Sort of like using translate.google.com gives something readable,
barely understandable, but certainly not how a native speaker would say it.)

So for big groups of text, I would think you'd want to keep it together.
But maybe I'm wrong. I know we're still not completely sure how the "bzr
help command" text is going to get translated. Though it seems that
we'll use something like gettext() to actually do the lookup and get the
translated content to the user.

John
=:->
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