[TYPO3-doc] DocBook: Translation of DocBook documents

[Sebastian Kurfürst]

Hey everybody,

I've been thinking a little on how translation should work. I think we
do not need to decide it now, but I'd like to share my current status.
After analyzing a few approaches taken by Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice, ..., I
think there are generally two ways:

Initial Translation:
A) copy (english) DocBook to another place (german) f.e.; start translating
B) (english) DocBook --> po4a --> translation in Pootle --> po4a -->
DocBook (german)

Updates of Translation
A) must be done by hand, really cumbersome... Changes need to be updated
manually.
B) basically like above, updating the source files in Pootle, and the
system will recognize which parts need updating.

It seems that Pootle is used by most big projects, for example on
OpenOffice.org how they use it for documentation, see
http://pootle.services.openoffice.org/de/xliff_help/scalc.xlf/translate/

As v4 is currently also transitioning to xliff files (and FLOW3 uses
them as well), we will have a pootle instance running anyways. The po4a
invocations will be then be done via Phing; so one could use for example:
phing translation.create de # create initial po files and upload them to
Pootle
phing translation.uploadChangesInOriginalLanguage # upload all changes
made to english translation to Pootle
phing translation.update de # download current translation status from
Pootle and update DocBook from it

We'd need to check out how po4a works in detail, but to me this sounds
like a promising concept :-)

Curious what you think... :-)

Greets,
Sebastian

[1] http://po4a.alioth.debian.org/