[pmwiki-users] (German) translation of documentation

[Arrigo Marchiori]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 02:32:15PM +0100, Christian Bartolomaeus wrote:

[...]
> I'd like to picture our approach. Maybe some of you have helpful
> comments or could use some of our ideas for translation to other
> languages.

First of all: what I'll write here mainly comes from
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Localization/Localization

> Basically we decided to tag all pages in the PmWikiDe group with page
> text variables. A sample page would look like:
> 
>   (:title Title of Page:)
>   (:Summary: short summary of content:)
>   (:Original_Page: PmWiki.PageName:)

This last tag is required if you rename the pages using German
words. Personally, I think that it's not a very smart idea, because it
adds more complexity to the translation update process.

I think that setting a German (:title:) for every page and leaving the
English name would be the best choice, because it would avoid you
tracking the names, and will allow you to automatize some of your work
(see below).

In fact, that is what we're doing for the Italian translations ;-)

The titles you write would be shown by page lists (e.g. search
results) and by links in the form [[PageName|+]], that is quite fast
to type. Users would see the English page names only if they look at
the URLs.

>   (:Translation_Date: 2008-03-11:)

Shouldn't this just be the same as $LastModified?

>   (:Translation_Status: %green%complete%%:)

This is useful.

>   (:Audience: Authors (Basics):)
>   %audience%{{$FullName}$:Audience}%%
>    
>   Inhalt der Seite
>    
>   %%trail% <<|[[DocumentationIndex|Dokumentationsindex]]|>> 

I'd type the link like this: [[DocumentationIndex|+]] (it's shorter! ;-).

> Furthermore in PmWikiDe.GroupHeader we have lines like this:
> 
>   %define=audience class='frame rfloat' font-size:smaller %bgcolor=#ffc%
> 
>   [-%green%(German translation of [[{$:Original_Page}]], translated: {$:Translation_Date})-]

You wouldn't need this if you kept the English name and used
$LastModified. And you could use the footer described in the
Localization page instead: that would automatically show the last
modified time of both the German and the English page!

> With page text variables defined we can use some page lists to have a
> list of pages needing attention and so on (see [1]).

If you kept the English names, you could instead use the table
described at the Localization page I pointed previously. You can check the
French version here: http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWikiFr/ListLocal

> Also we put something like
> 
>   %comment% [[!TranslateMeToGerman]] %%
> 
> near those paragraphs or items we have to translate. That way we can
> use a category page to list all pages containing untranslated text.
> Searching for 'TranslateMeToGerman' in the edit window we can easily
> find the relevant items.

This seems quite smart.

> Comments and suggestions are very appreciated!

I hope my comments can be useful for you!

-- 
rigo

http://rigo.altervista.org