Install Guide now in Publican

[Paul W. Frields]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 10:44:19AM +1000, Ruediger Landmann wrote:
> Paul W. Frields wrote:
>> Really?  Isn't using &DISTRO; a pretty good way to go, as opposed to
>> doing manual search and replace on "Fedora"?  On the other hand, I'm
>> sure the usage wasn't consistent throughout which is surely a problem
>> in itself.
>>   
> Some languages attach various grammatical elements (articles,  
> prepositions, case markers) to nouns, which means that an entity that  
> always appears exactly the same way in English may take a number of  
> different forms in a target language that behaves this way.

As soon as I read the first sentence I remembered exactly this problem
that we had in our translations originally.  That's why, in the Fedora
Docs toolchain, our entites are parsed before being committed to the
POT.  That way the translators see the real text and can translate
appropriately for their parts of speech.

So if our XML text included:

<para>Welcome to &DISTRO;.</para>

...in the POT that would end up as:

msgid ""
"Welcome to Fedora."

...and then the translator could handle that string as any other.  We
tried leaving the entities in the POT file for about a week, and the
translators quickly reminded us of the same thing you did --
requirements for noun declinations, and so forth.  So we reverted to
the behavior above.  The precise way we do this is with the command
'xml2po -e', using the gnome-doc-utils package.  We tried the '-k'
switch in the past, which caused the problem I just described, so we
went back to '-e'.  In fact, I think you'll find a note in our old
toolchain Makefile saying something like "Don't ever use '-k', that
would be stupid." :-D

So would I be correct in thinking that's not what Publican does, and
that entities are only supposed to be used in Publican docs to
represent non-translatables like a year or a company name?

> Thanks Paul for the pointers to fedora-trans-list and the package  
> maintainer's site. I still need a few of these signposts :) and thanks to 
> all for the positive feedback so far.

Thank you for all your hard work.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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