DocsProject common entities -- problem with translations?

[Paul W. Frields]

On Fri, 2007-04-06 at 02:58 +0100, Dimitris Glezos wrote:
> 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.

Some entities change less often, others more often.  In the future I
expect us to have a more robust test cycle for documentation, and you'll
be looking at monthly changes for things like "test2" => "test3".  A
small change, but it would echo throughout many, many documents and
message strings.

> 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.

-1 "we notify"; scaling problem
+1 subscriptions to fedora-docs-commits at redhat.com

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
      Fedora Project:  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PaulWFrields
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/docs/attachments/20070405/57b78591/attachment.bin