Re: German translation of PostgreSQL documentation

On Thu, Sep 25, 2003 at 05:02:43PM +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Alvaro Herrera writes:

> > [automatically manage translations of docs]

> I'm not aware of any magic available to simplify this task much.  In the
> end, you have to type everything yourself any way.

Well, of course you have to type everything.  But when updating the
translation, the scenario is different because a lot of text remains
exactly the same.  So what the tools should provide is a mean for
detecting the parts that changed.

PostgreSQL is not the first project in translating its documents.  In
fact the free desktop environments are very far ahead.  The KDE guys
devised a way to convert the DocBook into PO, which is more manageable
for translation; the translated PO can be converted back to DocBook.
The PO format provides most of what's necessary to keep translations
up-to-date, as of course you already know.

I think this requires switching from SGML DocBook to XML DocBook 4.2.  I
don't think it's too much to ask to change the format if it allows for
easy translation.  However IIRC Rod Taylor already proposed a change to
XML some time ago and you rejected it.  Would you accept the change now?

The i18n KDE group has a lot of good documentation and tools that could
be very useful to us:

http://i18n.kde.org/translation-howto/

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]dcc.uchile.cl>)
"El hombre nunca sabe de lo que es capaz hasta que lo intenta" (C. Dickens)