[Fwd: Online Help]

[Matthew P. Barnson]

Well, I hadn't really given that much thought, but it looks like the KDE
guys have already figured this out. 
http://i18n.kde.org/translation-howto/index.php .  It seems to be a
pretty comprehensive how-to, and I don't think we'd go wrong emulating
it, since the standards involved are fairly universal and becoming
better understood in the UNIX community these days.

Basically, if I understand correctly, we need to generate "empty" files
which contain the bare structure of the Guide for translations.  These
"empty" files are actually skeletal Docbook XML with no textual data
between the tags. Apparently, you can merge these "PO's" with the master
"POT" when the master (English) version of the Guide is updated, so that
translators end up with "fuzzy" areas on their translation, with English
words in there temporarily that need to be translated.

I'm not certain what to do about the section id links and other
xreflabels and such that give clues to locations of things in the
documentation.  I'm thinking we should probably stick to the English
definition of the link, but make sure that the entire text is UTF-8
encoded.  Although I'm really not even sure what that means at this
point, I'm sure I can figure it out :)

We probably want to put in a skeleton structure for translations we're
going to attempt first.  Although my German is quite rusty, after I
reorganize the doc, I'll be happy to begin translation efforts.  The
translation will be so bad that I am sure a native German speaker will
desparately want to correct it.  I suggest we use ISO3166-1 codes, like
this:

bugzilla/en/docs/sgml (or html, or txt, whatever)
bugzilla/de/docs/sgml
bugzilla/pt/docs/sgml (Portugal Portuguese translation)
bugzilla/br/docs/sgml (Brazilian Portuguese translation)
etc.

What would really be the cat's meow would be to have the country code be
*before* the Bugzilla path, so that we can indicate an entire localized
tree:

en/bugzilla/docs/sgml
de/bugzilla/docs/sgml
etc.

That would make it easier on the linking for the app, so we don't have
to have logic in the app with a param saying "please enter your
two-letter ISO3166 country code here".  Although, IMHO, that would be an
acceptable parameter if we don't want to have separate localized
versions of the app...


On Tue, 2002-11-05 at 02:37, Gervase Markham wrote:
> So how would you solve the localisation problem?
 
-- 
Matthew P. Barnson
Sr. UNIX Systems Administrator
DAM Computer Consulting, Inc.
"When you cuss, think of us!"

"...the general idea that [the Supreme Court ]will restrain
itself, despite believing a law is stupid, is a feature,
not a bug in our constitutional tradition."
-Lawrence Lessig
nd 100%". --Penn Jillette
 one and drive on without guilt!
-ccm