dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

[Jason Pickering <jason.p.pickering@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Romain,

This is part of the reason that we  created the workflow using Serna,
brz and Launchpad. We have a set of distributed individuals that are
making changes, potentially at the same time, to the same document.
Version control systems are very good at handling and merging these
types of changes. However, it was felt that in order to extend the
translation of the documents to persons who were not familiar with
these tools, that PO Editor was a better choice. It is a great choice
for translators, as they only need to worry about the translation of
strings, and not anything else in the document itself. So, no need to
learn DocBook.

The use of bzr (a version control system) is still possible with PO
files themselves, but requires some familiarity with the use of the
tool and the use of Launchpad. We can consider putting these PO files
under version control, which will allow a translation team to work in
a distributed way.

The other possibility is the use of the Google Spreadsheet which has
been setup. When this is used, changes to the document is recorded
automatically, even when different users are editing the same
document.

Another possibility is the use of Launchpads own translation system,
which we need to investigate more.

As I have sort of alluded to, I still believe that the use of a
version control system is the only feasible technical way to solve
these problems. However, it does require a certain amount of learning
to get used to using the tools.


Johan, Phillipe, myself and hopefully Knut will meet week in Geneva to
discuss some of these issues. You feedback is very valuable, and it
would be good to know what you would be comfortable using a version
control system like bzr. You can consult the DHIS2 Documentation Guide
for more information about how it works.

Best regards,
Jason



On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 1:05 PM,  <romain@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi Knut,
> Thanks for raising this topic. I have tried to get the french translation
> done with the help of Lars using the PO Editor, but I gave up because of
> problems with commit process. But this is a technical problem that can be
> solved with little work. I found the PO Editor ok and quite easy to use.
> And maybe it is the best way to go.
> The problem here for me is organizational. Because for instance I know
> that Edem also is working on French translation too, so we need to
> synchronize our work to avoid duplication of efforts. I think we first need
> to create translation teams by languages and select a head for each team.
> Then we must provide a timeline to get the job done. Each team will
> organise itself to meet the goal in the requested time. The mean they will
> use (machine or human or both) is not in that case important if the team
> can ensure that they are ok with the translation provided at the end of the
> work.
>
> Hope this contribution is helpful...
>
> Regards,
>
> Romain
>
> On Wed, 15 Sep 2010 09:34:44 +0200, Knut Staring <knutst@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Moving this discussion to the main developer list as well as the
>> documentation list to ensure input from all concerned.
>>
>> Thanks to the team currently contributing to a French translation of
>> the DHIS manual and inline help. Jason and I have been working on find
>> the best  workflow for this work, but it is not obvious that there is
>> really a good one, because there are a number of issues that may be
>> conflicting.
>>
>> Ideally, we would like to:
>>
>> 1) keep the original English documentation in DocBook XML format,
>> which allows us to generate many formats, such as PDF and HTML, as
>> well as incorporate the text into the online help inside DHIS 2
>> itself.
>>
>> 2) keep both the DocBook structure and translated text (which can be
>> in PO files) under some sort of version control, so we can track
>> changes, and readily generate artefacts such as PDFs
>>
>> 3) make it easy for translators, so they can concentrate on the
>> language rather than tools like Bazaar, Maven, and DocBook/XML
>>
>> 3b) I thought it would be easier to start from a machine translation
>> and do corrections, rather than start with just the English and write
>> everything. I would very much like the opinion of people who have some
>> actual experience correcting Google translations to French (the
>> quality is likely to differ for each language). A third possibility
>> would be that you just used Google translate or something similar
>> yourself by copy/paste, I guess.
>>
>> 4) easily share translations, and especially have a common and
>> consistently used glossary for DHIS terms such as organisation unit
>> and data element.
>>
>> 5) have an easy way of identifying which parts have changed in the
>> original, so the translations can be updated.
>>
>> A translator could work directly with DocBook, using and XML editor
>> like Serna, but then machine translation becomes more tricky. For PO
>> files, you can use a PO editor. They can be generated and re-inserted
>> into DocBook (though there are some minor issues). Launchpad also
>> supports the PO format. For raw text, you can use Google Docs or any
>> editor but the issue is then how to get the translated strings back
>> into the DocBook structure.
>>
>> And throughout, the problem of changes in the original presents
>> itself. To my mind, most parts of the manual will quickly
>> stabilize.The alternative would be to almost completely decouple the
>> different languages, and just keep the chapter or section headings,
>> sort of like Wikipedia does for different languages.
>>
>> Appreciate your input - for example on which of the considerations
>> above you find most important.
>>
>> Knut
>>
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-- 
Jason P. Pickering
email: jason.p.pickering@xxxxxxxxx
tel:+17069260025
sip:jason.p.pickering@xxxxxxxxx