RFC: How to translate help topics.

[INADA Naoki]

Thank you for all.

> Yes, and Rosetta does not guarantee the same order of translatable chunks as
> they exists in the original PO file. I think this is BAD BAD BAD thing for
> single text splitted into chunks. And I'm -1 on this.

I didn't know that. It's a big disadvantage of splitting help per paragraph.
Though, we should not split help topic, or split more big chunks.
Help topics is written in reST. So "\n"*2 and "\n"*3 makes same output.
Now I use "\n\n" as a chunk separator. Can we use "\n"*3 instead?

Mercurial guys starts with big text and be suffered by changing one sentence
makes whole translated text is disabled. I think we should have some way to
manage changes of help and help translaters.


On Sat, May 7, 2011 at 1:23 AM, Alexander Belchenko <bialix at ukr.net> wrote:
> John Arbash Meinel пишет:
>>
>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>> Hash: SHA1
>>
>>
>> ....
>>>
>>> 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).
>
> Yes, and Rosetta does not guarantee the same order of translatable chunks as
> they exists in the original PO file. I think this is BAD BAD BAD thing for
> single text splitted into chunks. And I'm -1 on this.
>
>> 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.)
>
> Exactly +1e6
>
>> 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.
>
> No, in my opinion: it should be kept together.
>
> Also, please note that if you want to have good-quality translations then
> using Rosetta is not the good deal anyway: you have to restrict translate to
> the special trusted team otherwise you'll have so bad translations, so
> believe me -- english will be the better choice then.
>
> Therefore if you will restrict translations to dedicated team then it does
> not matter if that team should use only LP or has to get txt files from
> branch -- that's not really a question. It's a matter of required process,
> isn't it?
>
>
>
> --
> All the dude wanted was his rug back
>



-- 
INADA Naoki  <songofacandy at gmail.com>