[Po4a-devel][CVS] po4a/lib/Locale/Po4a Xml.pm,NONE,1.1

Martin Quinson mquinson@ens-lyon.fr
Tue, 20 Jul 2004 14:21:47 -0700


On Tue, Jul 20, 2004 at 01:43:43PM +0200, Jordi Vilalta wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Jul 2004, Martin Quinson wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Jul 20, 2004 at 12:34:51AM +0200, Jordi Vilalta wrote:
> > > 
> > > Maybe this isn't very friendly to pure translators, but I think that 
> > > software translators should have a minimal idea about the format they're 
> > > translating (see the 'E<lt>' stuff in the extracted strings from the man 
> > > pages).
> > 
> > You mean that "<b>bla</b>" is more friendly than "B<bla>"? I don't see any
> > difference... It's already better that the ".B bla" of groff (which must be
> > alone on a line), isn't it?
> 
> Oops, no, no. I didn't want to compare them. I just meant that any of 
> these approaches are outside the natural language, and it requires a 
> (very small) knowledge about markup tags. With this I wanted to justify 
> that the artificial msgids have a difficulty similar to this.

Ok, sorry for misinterpreting your statement, then. I agree that those tags
do imply some extra burden on the translator shoulder. But I guess there is
not much we can do. 

The solution may come from the editors. kbabel could well have an editing
mode in WYSIWYG, undertanding and dealing properly with docbook tags. It
should be doable, but I'm not sure it would be a good idea for now, since
there is so much possible way to screw things up around.

As said in the signature of the previous mail, I do belive that things must
be made as easy as possible, but not easier. ;)

> > But if I had to redo the man module now, I'd go for docbook-like tag intead
> > of pod notation. But I don't plan to change that for now...
> 
> I think this isn't necessary by now.

It could be made an option, but the issue is that if the author makes its
pot with one notation and the translator with another, you'll get fuzzies.
Unless you implement also a on the fly convertion, but I'm not sure it
worths the work. 

Thanks for your time, 
Mt.

-- 
If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a
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