[Live-demo] Motion: Changing translation system to use Sphinx internationalization instead of directory approach

[Siki Zoltan]

Hi,

in case of QGIS GUI translation, transifex has a big disdvantage comparing 
to Qtlinguist (which were used resently). The context is lost, the 
translator has no idea from where the message (dialog, source line, etc.) 
comes from. Another problem raises when you would like to translate 
long messages, you can see only a small part of the message on the screen 
(which is the case in OSGeoLive).

Regards,
Zoltan

On Sat, 18 Jul 2015, Thomas Gratier wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I had a discussion at FOSS4G Europe about using Sphinx internationalization
> <http://sphinx-doc.org/latest/intl.html> (i18n) instead of the current
> directory approach.
>
> Why?
> It's already used in QGIS project, MapServer project, Python project,..
>
> The advantages:
>
> * Untied translators and contributors jobs by using Transifex
> * Keeping the translation updated. For instance, if I do a translation in
> French, then the English doc evolves slightly, it's difficult to track the
> differences and I need to read nearly everything again or browse the
> original file history then apply the change in French. It's not friendly IMO
> * Do not use symbolic links when missing files: fallback to english
> directly with i18n and not issue with Git (try to build the doc and do a
> "git status" to understand)
>
> If you wonder about the simplicity of Transifex, you can see the MapServer
> documentation at http://mapserver.org/fr/development/translation.html
>
> The drawbacks:
>
> * It can't make documents differ per language (strict translation)
>
> I've already worked a bit to make things happen about this at the code
> sprint but I would like to reorganize the documentation to improve the
> experience.
>
> Do you have any opinions before I go further?
>
>
> Cheers
>
> Thomas Gratier
>