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

[Thomas Gratier]

Hi,

You are right about the fact that long sentences are more difficult to
manage with Transifex but as the string follow the order of the text, it
can be done by translating in one go 3 strings (if the long sentence was
splitted in 3).

For QGIS GUI, I had a discussion with someone from GFOSS.it (Italian OSGEO
chapter). The issue you have is mainly due to the translated QT file (the
ts file format) as it does not manage references to lines from original
files. So, QTlinguist seems to be a good alternative.

For documentation using Sphinx, we use po file format. With this format, we
do not have an issue as it references the original file and line for each
string e.g
https://github.com/mapserver/docs/blob/branch-6-4/translated/fr/about.po#L28

Cheers and regards

Thomas Gratier

2015-07-18 17:15 GMT+02:00 Siki Zoltan <siki at agt.bme.hu>:

> 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
>>
>>
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