Mallard and Ubuntu-Translators and Translation Regressions

[Milo Casagrande]

2010/2/25 Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com>:
>
> 2. In theory, transition to Mallard doesn't necessarily involve any
> rewriting of documentation, because our existing goal includes writing
> topic based documents, as you've said. Whether that will result in
> strings being reused is not something we can guarantee until we've
> tried out the translation workflow in more detail: Milo may have an
> idea because he is one of the leading contributors to Mallard
> documentation at Gnome.

You can reuse as much as you will from the old Docbook documentation
to Mallard, but there is always a problem: Mallard syntax is different
from Docbook one.
So, if you just have a:
<para>
 Put some simple text here.
</para>
With only text in it, you are safe and the translations will be
reused. But if you start having something like:
<para>
 Put some text here with a lot of Docbook tags,
<guimenu>XYZ</guimenu>, <emphasis>YXZ</emphasis>,
<application>ZYX</application>.
</para>
or lists, or tables, you are going to lose you translations (at least
in Launchpad since we don't have fuzzy, and also probably with a
msgmerge) since the Mallard syntax will be different, and will be
considered as a brand new string to translate.

> 3. If ubuntu-docs moves to Mallard, that will almost certainly result
> in a smaller documentation footprint between us and Gnome upstream -
> more documentation coming from upstream will be reused and integrated.
> That is good for translators, although of course the fact that Gnome
> upstream are planning to completely rewrite their documentation from
> scratch will mean that the emphasis of translators may move to Gnome
> away from us.

I have been thinking a lot about how to handle a sane translation
process while rewriting the entire Gnome User Guide. Haven't come out
with anything yet, will definitely need to talk with Shaun and the
others at the Dekstop Help Summit about this, and hopefully have a
proposal draft ready for April to start talking with the Gnome i18n
community.
It's not easy and probably it will not be, I totally understand this
and the many concerns translators could have.

Ciao.

-- 
Milo Casagrande <milo at casagrande.name>