Moving this discussion to the main developer list as well as the
documentation list to ensure input from all concerned.
Thanks to the team currently contributing to a French translation of
the DHIS manual and inline help. Jason and I have been working on find
the best workflow for this work, but it is not obvious that there is
really a good one, because there are a number of issues that may be
conflicting.
Ideally, we would like to:
1) keep the original English documentation in DocBook XML format,
which allows us to generate many formats, such as PDF and HTML, as
well as incorporate the text into the online help inside DHIS 2
itself.
2) keep both the DocBook structure and translated text (which can be
in PO files) under some sort of version control, so we can track
changes, and readily generate artefacts such as PDFs
3) make it easy for translators, so they can concentrate on the
language rather than tools like Bazaar, Maven, and DocBook/XML
3b) I thought it would be easier to start from a machine translation
and do corrections, rather than start with just the English and write
everything. I would very much like the opinion of people who have some
actual experience correcting Google translations to French (the
quality is likely to differ for each language). A third possibility
would be that you just used Google translate or something similar
yourself by copy/paste, I guess.
4) easily share translations, and especially have a common and
consistently used glossary for DHIS terms such as organisation unit
and data element.
5) have an easy way of identifying which parts have changed in the
original, so the translations can be updated.
A translator could work directly with DocBook, using and XML editor
like Serna, but then machine translation becomes more tricky. For PO
files, you can use a PO editor. They can be generated and re-inserted
into DocBook (though there are some minor issues). Launchpad also
supports the PO format. For raw text, you can use Google Docs or any
editor but the issue is then how to get the translated strings back
into the DocBook structure.
And throughout, the problem of changes in the original presents
itself. To my mind, most parts of the manual will quickly
stabilize.The alternative would be to almost completely decouple the
different languages, and just keep the chapter or section headings,
sort of like Wikipedia does for different languages.
Appreciate your input - for example on which of the considerations
above you find most important.
Knut