[open-data-manual] Sphinx/Transifex translation tool chain

Tue Sep 6 08:49:05 UTC 2011

"Tim McNamara" <tim.mcnamara at okfn.org>:

> No, it's quite manual. We have been going through a learning process.
> The Sphinx l18n work is very new, and our procedures are largely
> undocumented. We hope to be able to write a detailed blog post
> explaining our processes so other projects can learn in the short
> term.
>
> Moreover, I would like to avoid keeing documentation about the editing
> and translation processes with the rest of the instructions. I want to
> avoid burdening people who just want to write. Rufus and I can take
> text, then do the fiddly work of incorporating it into the manual.
>
> [...]
>
> Please don't create another project on Transifex. I recommend joining
> the de team: https://www.transifex.net/projects/p/opendatamanual/team/de/

No worries, I'm not planning to set-up another project on Tran-
sifex. To clearify, I've used ReST and i18n/gettext tools be-
fore in different context, and it was new to me that Sphinx
now will support that (which is really cool) so I wanted to
understand how that works in the context of the ODM.

I was particularly concerned about blocking effects resulting
from ongoing editing of the original text while others trans-
lating it. Now I've played with Sphinx' gettext and it does
what it can possibly do, including unwrapping paragraphs be-
fore putting them into msgids in .pot files.

Of course, larger intra-paragraph edits will cause new msgids
to appear and/or others to disappear when the number of para-
graphs changes, but it would be unfair to blame Sphinx for
that.

An idea popping-up now is if it would make sense to add the
.pot files into GitHub, maybe only when reaching certain re-
leases or milestones? One advantage would be that people
could see them without needing an account on Transifex (at
least I could download the Italian ODM .pot files there only
after logging in). Or people could work offline on transla-
tions, although Transifex is really fun. But I guess that
would mean more itegration work with Transifex... I said,
just an idea...

Regards,

Dinu