[parted-devel] Fwd: french translation of parted 3.2.1 man page

[Mario Blättermann]

Hi Jean-Luc,

Am 16.08.2014 11:09, schrieb Duflot Jean-Luc:
> Le 15/08/2014 20:06, Mario Blättermann a écrit :
>> Hi Jean-Luc,
>>
>> Am 15.08.2014 18:11, schrieb Duflot Jean-Luc:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> On behalf of Jim Meyering, I send you this translation. Please see his attached
>>> message.
>>>
>>> I hope that this translation is useful and that it can be taken into account in
>>> some tranlation package or some website.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Jean-luc Duflot
>>>
>> Nice to see a new man page translator! But please, don't work on a plain text
>> file. To simplify keeping your work in sync with current and future English
>> versions, you should use a po file. The current po4a stack in parted is broken,
>> so I sent some scripts to this list [1] which generate pot templates and
>> translated versions, but nobody was willing or able to integrate them into the
>> autotools workflow before releasing the current version 3.2. Maybe you have some
>> autotools skills and could help out to fix it?
>>
>> [1] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2014-July/004550.html
>>
>> Best Regards,
>> Mario
> 
> Hi Mario,
> 
> I do not understand well you answer : this is a man page, so the English
> original file is in troff format, then compressed in .gz format. And it is
> readable by the command " man parted " in a terminal. That's the case for all
> Unix and Linux man pages.
> 
> I believe the .po format is used for the translation of the application itself,
> that means all is displayed on the screen by a graphical application.
> 
GNU Gettext generates po files from user interface strings. That's the current
state so far. The advantage of Gettext is to simplify tracking changes in the
original files. A new template will be created, which can be merged with the
latest po files so that translators can do their work without the need to dig in
the source code.

A similar thing is po4a [1]: It creates pot templates (or updates existing po
files) from various documentation-related source codes, like asciidoc, texinfo,
groff, xml and many more. Imagine, you have translated version 3.2.1 for now,
directly working on the groff sources, and a newer one named 3.4 will be
released. The included man pages have been changed significantly, and you have
to figure out first what is changed and where. You could miss something or
delete valid parts by accidence. The way with po4a eases your life. It splits
the groff source into small chunks and writes them into the pot template. You
translate it, and po4a writes the strings back to the translated groff file. You
see the recent changes at a glance and don't have to bother with formatting or
anything else.

Imagine again, one day you don't have the time anymore to work on a doc
translation, or you are even no longer motivated for that task. Then the Parted
people roll new releases again and again, and your translated man page becomes
outdated and more and more useless. But po4a helps out: your existing
translation will be merged with the new templates, and if some strings are
untranslated, they will be skipped. Of course, they appear in English now
surrounded by French text, but they are present! That way a translation never
get outdated.

There are already a lot of projects which use po4a. Even in Debian all man pages
related to dpkg [2] and apt are maintained with this excellent tool, and some
more packages, too. And last but not least, there's an external man page
translation project named manpages-fr [3] which works on French translations of
the Linux programming manuals using po4a.

[1] http://po4a.alioth.debian.org/
[2] https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/dpkg/dpkg.git/tree/man/po
[3] https://alioth.debian.org/projects/perkamon/

Best Regards,
Mario