Re: [docbook-apps] OT: How to translate DocBook documents intodifferent languages

[Jordi Vilalta <jvprat@wanadoo.es>]

Hi,

On Thu, 19 Aug 2004, Joachim Ziegler wrote:
> This is off-topic, but maybe some of you are sometimes faced with the same 
> problem:
>
> I have a long English Docbook document (440 pages in  printed output) that I 
> want to translate to German.
>
> There a two important points for me:
>
> - In the English document, I don't want to type in again all the markup which 
> took me so many hours. I want to reuse my precious markup. The structure of 
> the target document will be exactly the same.
>
> - I want to use a translation program to produce a first, rough version of a 
> (mechanical) translation.
>
> What is a good approach to do this? Can these steps be mixed? Are there 
> programs for these kind of jobs? Any experiences? Advices?

I'm currently working in a program called po4a (po for anything), which 
aims to help in the translation of documentation using the gettext 
standard po files. There's currently an sgml module that can handle pretty 
well the sgml docbook documents (and some simple xml documents). We're 
currently working on an Xml module which will soon be able to completely 
translate docbook xml documents.

This extracts the translateable strings from the original document and 
puts them in a po file. Then you can edit this manually or with one of the 
available programs for this (kbabel, gtranslator, poedit, emacs po 
mode...), and the program itself can generate a translated document from 
the original document and the translation po (using the original 
document's structure, and using the translated strings from the po file).

This also helps in the mantainance of the translations. I hope it helps 
you. If it doesn't fit your needs, you're welcome to open a bug report or 
contacting us in the project mailing list.

You can find it at http://po4a.alioth.debian.org

About the mechanical translation, I know nothing about it, but I think 
that if a program like this exists, it should support po files. Let me 
know if you find it.

> Thank you very much in advance,

You're welcome.

Regards,

Jordi Vilalta