DocsProject common entities -- problem with translations?

[Dimitris Glezos]

O/H Paul W. Frields έγραψε:
> So it sounds like we will have annoyances no matter which choice we
> make:
> 
> 1.  Using "xml2po -k" and keeping entities intact like &NAME; there are
> translators who will be inconvenienced.  They can still substitute
> translations for the entity -- using the right form of "SomeName,"
> instead of the exact string "&NAME;" -- but there will be no benefit to
> them in the event the entity changes.  They may not even notice that it
> *has* changed unless they are watching the
> docs-common/common/entities/po/entities.pot file, and making the mental
> connection.
> 
> 2.  Using "xml2po -e" and transforming the entities into strings in the
> POT file, so "&NAME;" becomes "SomeName," it will be painful to change
> single strings in a minor way, since *many* fuzzy entries potentially
> result from trivial changes.

So, we (translators) need to decide here:

  1. Following 1., some translators behave differently than the others and
hard-translate the entities (substitute "&NAME;" with "Somename") when they need
to. When an entity changes ("&FOO;" becomes "Fedora 8") the translator will have
to manually update all occurrences for this language of "Fedora 8" to "Fedora 9".

  2. All languages will get fuzzy translations once an entity changes. All of
them will have to do the job described in 1.

So, the Q is: How often does an entity change and how big is this change? At
this period we are changing "Fedora Core" -> "Fedora" and "Fedora Core 6" ->
"Fedora 7". Later we'll probably only do the latter every 6 months.

If we choose 1, we can make sure that we notify those language teams that
substitute the entities that the entities have changed. They can then
search-and-replace all their files and substitute everything at the same time
(with a tool like `regexxer`). So 1. might not be as bad as it sounds after all.

What do the translators of the languages in question think about this?

> We can revert to behavior #2, and I can get this into the POTs for
> important modules now.  I would like opinions within the next 24 hours.
> We first raised this issue almost two weeks ago in our meeting,
> summarized here:
> 
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-docs-list/2007-March/msg00186.html
>
> Reminder to translators working on documentation:  please make sure you
> are subscribed to fedora-docs-list at redhat.com for information.  Thank
> you and we look forward to hearing from you about this issue.

Unfortunately I didn't catch this problem back then and I almost missed it some
days ago because in greek we don't have it. More translators' eyes on -docs-list
mean more chances to catch these problems on time. :-)

-d


-- 
Dimitris Glezos
Jabber ID: glezos at jabber.org, GPG: 0xA5A04C3B
http://dimitris.glezos.com/

"He who gives up functionality for ease of use
loses both and deserves neither." (Anonymous)
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