[pmwiki-users] (German) translation of documentation

[Christian Bartolomaeus]

Hi Arrigo,

thanks for your input!

* On 2008-03-17 Arrigo Marchiori (ardovm at yahoo.it) 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

I have to admit that I missed that page when writing my mail. I found
it one or two days later.

> > 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 ;-)

Right now the German translation also follows this path. But there are
a few "special" pages, like "Site/EditQuickReference" or "Site/Search"
which we want to translate in PmWikiDe as well. In order to have a
uniform way to get the original page, I thought a page text variable
like "$:Original_Page" could be useful. But maybe it's superfluous.

> 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.

Yes, [[PageName|+]] is very useful.

> >   (:Translation_Date: 2008-03-11:)
> 
> Shouldn't this just be the same as $LastModified?

As Oliver writes in his post, I think "Translation_Date" should be set
to the date when the translation is considered complete. I guess there
will be small edits (to remove typos or to add or change examples,
etc.) to the original page as well as to the translated pages. In
those cases $LastModified might be set to a date just a few days ago,
but last time someone compared the complete translation to the English
page might be two years ago. In that case $LastModified would be
misleading.

Actually, I think it's not very useful to look at $LastModified when
one wants to know, whether the translation is up-to-date.

> >   (:Audience: Authors (Basics):)
> >   %audience%{{$FullName}$:Audience}%%
> >    
> >   Inhalt der Seite
> >    
> >   %%trail% <<|[[DocumentationIndex|Dokumentationsindex]]|>> 
> 
> I'd type the link like this: [[DocumentationIndex|+]] (it's shorter! ;-).

True enough. I'll keep that in mind ;-)

> > 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!

As I wrote above I'm not sure the approach with $LastModified is very
reliable.

> > 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

Yes, we kind of reinvented the wheel. Thanks for the pointer.

> > Comments and suggestions are very appreciated!
> 
> I hope my comments can be useful for you!

They are, thanks!

Christian
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