RFC: How to translate help topics.

[INADA Naoki]

On Sat, May 7, 2011 at 2:04 AM, Alexander Belchenko <bialix at ukr.net> wrote:
> INADA Naoki пишет:
>>
>> 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..
>
> I can't be 100% sure but as qbzr/explorer i18n stuff maitnainer I was always
> puzzled why POT file generated by xgettext and the one imported/exported
> from LP is different. Maybe it's fixed now, we need to double check.
>
> So, it will be nice to have some confirmation to prove that I'm wrong from
> actual Rosetta developers/maintainers. Because I could be wrong.

I want to make sandbox for bzr i18n.
May I make a project named bzr-i18n-test?

>
>> 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.
>
> That's always problem with gettext. It cannot be solved in any easy way.
>
> If you have splitted command help into 3 chunks
>
> A
> B
> C
>
> and in English you'll have
>
> A(en)
> B(en)
> C(en)
>
> Then people have translated them into some language and it becomes
>
> A(lang)
> B(lang)
> C(lang)
>
> Then original B chunk has changed 1 line, then you got in runtime
>
> A(lang)
> B(eng)
> C(lang)
>
> Is it good? Of course it depends on the real situation and how tightly
> paragraps coupled together. What's better: have a mix of English +
> Translation or don't have translation at all, but have consistent English
> text? IMO it depends.
>
> What if B part has important text and without understanding that text it'll
> be hard to understand the C part? I don't see any good workaround here.
> That's all or nothing, always, with gettext. Translations should be always
> up-to-date, otherwise you'll have one problem of other.
>
> I don't have good answer here. But we have to decide now and improve later,
> in any case.
>


I think human should controls size of chunk of text.
If chunk is large enough, mixing English and other language per chunk
is better than whole text is English.


-- 
INADA Naoki  <songofacandy at gmail.com>