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Re: [docbook-apps] OT: How to translate DocBook documents intodifferent languages
- From: Jordi Vilalta <jvprat at wanadoo dot es>
- To: docbook-apps <docbook-apps at lists dot oasis-open dot org>
- Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 11:55:14 +0200 (CEST)
- Subject: Re: [docbook-apps] OT: How to translate DocBook documents intodifferent languages
- References: <41246EBF.2000200@mpi-sb.mpg.de>
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