Problems translating faqguide [Fwd: Re: xml2po]

[Matthew East]

Dear all,

we have some very serious problems translating the faqguide. I believe
that this is caused by the fact that the document is in a number of
different files, although a more accurate technical explanation has been
provided by danilo of gnome-doc-devel in the below email.

To a certain extent, this problem is a little bit too complex for me, so
any help or suggestions would really be welcome.

A possibility is merging the faqguide back to one file (faqguide.xml),
ensuring that it validates properly, and then redoing the .pot file and
uploading it. What do people think of this idea?

Matt

-------- Forwarded Message --------
> From: Danilo Šegan <danilo at gnome.org>
> To: mdke at ubuntu.com
> Cc: gnome-doc-devel-list at gnome.org
> Subject: Re: xml2po
> Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 13:02:01 +0200
> 
> Hi Matthew,
> 
> Today at 11:52, Matthew East wrote:
> 
> > The relevant xml file can be found here:
> > https://docteam.ubuntu.com/repos/branches/breezy/generic/faqguide/C/installing-applications.xml
> 
> This file is not even well-formed XML.  xml2po really can't work with
> such files, even though it tries sometimes.  However, you are
> referencing entities which are not defined, so xml2po is pretty much
> lost.
> 
> A good test if xml2po will be able to handle a file is to pass it
> through "xmllint": if there are no errors, you're pretty safe.
> 
> Also, it's suggested that you use "-e" option (replace all entities,
> this is really essential for any translation, since a single entity
> might take a number of forms in translations, and only translator
> knows when they need which), and to use "xinclude" mechanism for
> multi-file documents.  Gnome release notes are a good example of all
> this, and they live in Gnome CVS under 
> 
>   gnomeweb-wml/www.gnome.org/start/2.12/notes/
> 
> 
> Also, I have some plans to support this kind of documents, but it
> involves a couple of ugly hacks which I am not really looking forward
> to implementing (such as extracting DTD node from another document,
> inserting it in the current document tree, then trying to parse that 
> combination, and stripping the DTD node on output).
> 
> > As you can see, a number of paragraphs are put on the same line of
> > the .pot file, and loads of the entities (e.g. &ubuntu;) have been
> > missed out.
> 
> Exactly—entities are undefined, so xml2po does best it can: it ignores
> them.
> 
> Really, I think you should restructure your document to be more suited
> for translation, and that would also make it a lot easier for
> maintenance as well.
> 
> If you need a quick solution, you can simply use "xml2po -e" on your
> top-level document (faqguide.xml), which will include all the files
> correctly, but you'll be able to get only a single merged .xml file
> that way. 
> 
> I can also suggest that you make use of gnome-doc-utils build system,
> and migrating is described at:
> 
>   http://live.gnome.org/GnomeDocUtilsMigrationHowTo
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> Danilo
-- 
Matthew East
matthew.east at breathe.com
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