Re: [docbook-apps] managing translations

[Yasushi SHOJI <yashi@atmark-techno.com>]

Hi Philip,

At Thu, 14 May 2009 15:32:28 -0700,
Philip Olson wrote:
> 
> All advice is welcome for dealing with translations.

My post is not an advice per se, but just sharing exp. with you all.

> Our desired setup:
>   - Not use CVS numbers (we are moving to SVN)
>   - Have markup changes not affect (outdate) translations
>   - Implement translation management software like transifex or similar

we've move our manuals to docbook a while ago and placed xml2po in our
build script since then.

our setup is:

 - all files are in git
 - using xml2po to extract strings from xml
 - we have 1860 files (including couple build files)

> We're considering a move to po files but given the size of our project  
> (over 6000 files) we're wanting to design the ideal system before this  
> likely painful migration/implementation.

I've been working on a few non-docbook projects incorporating
gettext/po, and po is a ok solution for a few thousand translatable
strings.  As you might already know that it can tell us what strings
has been changed on source and what has been erased and gone. It is
quite easy to merge original pot file and lang.po and so forth.

we have not yet fully tested po with docbook/xml, but gnome and other
open source project has been using it for a while.  there must be some
pitfalls, but our project is not big enough to notify us just yet.

our team is basically all engineers so there is no problem using po
files directly or emacs mode.  there is windows version of po editor,
poedit, at poedit.net, and it is ok for non tech windows translators.

transifex seems to be very nice front end for translators. but I
personally have not used it yet.

regards,
-- 
              yashi