[kde-doc-english] reusing text blocks and snippets in the documentation + translation

[Yuri Chornoivan]

На Sat, 14 Feb 2009 01:38:56 +0200, Burkhard Lück <lueck at hube-lueck.de> написав:

> Hi translators and documentation writers,
>
> we have a lot of duplicated text blocks and their translations spread  
> over
> many documentations in KDE.
> E.g. the a11y.docbooks in koffice, documentation of the editor component  
> for
> kate/kwrite, shortcut dialog and ...
>
8<----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> * now this is automatically processed by the i18n tool chain like any  
> other
> documentation, just business as usual for the translation teams.
>
> * changed / new docbook text blocks in kdelibs? Translation teams see  
> this
> immediately in the stats and in lokalize.
>
> * Translation teams try to generate an updated documentation which is  
> using a
> new/changed text block in kdelibs, but the teams forgot to update these
> translations?
> scripts/update_xml will simply refuse that! If the teams do not update  
> of the
> translations of the text block in kdelibs, it is impossible for them to
> update of the translated documentation!
>
> Comments or suggestions for a better solution?
>

Hi!

I think there is no need to do any of these things. Translators used to know what they are doing and know how to ease their work (correct me if it's not the case :) ). On the other hand documentators do what they want (and that's right): if they want to remove "silly" sentences from all kdegames documentation without any notice, they can do it! ;-)

As a sort of mathematician I can say that splitting documentation into libraries make whole system much more complicated and as a result less effective (well, it is complicated enough to make many translators through the years to translate two _absolutely_ identical adjacent messages in userguide/groupware-kontact.docbook differently ;-) ).

Moreover (IMHO), if someone wants to translate something or make documentation for some application it is up to the corresponding coordinator to make template of translation (using team's translation memory) or docbook template (corresponding to appropriate KDE module). If someone from documentation team wants to use up strings from other docs that's great, if he does not that's great too, documentation becomes more readable and useful if it's not a set of sentences that are the same except for the program's name.

That's what I think. ;-)

Best regards,
Yuri