[Gpg4win-devel] Multilanguage Compendium

[Werner Koch]

On Wed,  6 Apr 2016 22:24, jochen at intevation.de said:

> translations to *po files and manage them seperately. This idea would
> have the advantage, so the translator doesnt need to worry about design
> of the document through the translation-process.

I once looked at the po4a system but figured that it is not suitable for
documents: Minor changes in the original text too often require updated
translations.  Translators are translating strings and tend not to
consider the context.  There is more to a translation than string
translations - for example you need to tweak the text for proper
rendering.  PO was designed to translate single strings in programs.  As
soon as you need more than about 2 lines you already run into trouble
and need to use kludges in the program to detect changed translations.

GnuPG used for more than a decade Ralf Engelschall's WML system which
allows for easy translations (using slices).  That system is very
similar to po4a and has even the advantage that the translator can see
the context - however the translation were almost always outdated and
the translation work not easy because the context also included all
other languages.

Professional translators have their dedicated tools for translation
which are a better choice than the PO or WML kludges.  Meanwhile we may
even have free software tools for that task.  Or you simply use two
frames with the original text and the translation; there is a
translation.el to support this.


Salam-Shalom,

   Werner

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