Browsing Italian translation

24.

Actually, this section is not really part of this document. Instead, it is placed in each module's documentation. This helps ensuring that the information is up to date by keeping the documentation and the code together.

28.

I like the idea of open-source software, making it possible for everybody to access to software and to their source code. But being French, I'm well aware that the licensing is not the only restriction to the openness of software: non-translated free software is useless for non-English speakers, and we still have some work to make it available to really everybody out there.

29.

The perception of this situation by the open-source actors did dramatically improve recently. We, as translators, won the first battle and convinced everybody of the translations' importance. But unfortunately, it was the easy part. Now, we have to do the job and actually translate all this stuff.

30.

Actually, open-source software themselves benefit of a rather decent level of translation, thanks to the wonderful gettext tool suite. It is able to extract the strings to translate from the program, present a uniform format to translators, and then use the result of their works at run time to display translated messages to the user.

31.

But the situation is rather different when it comes to documentation. Too often, the translated documentation is not visible enough (not distributed as a part of the program), only partial, or not up to date. This last situation is by far the worst possible one. Outdated translation can reveal worse than no translation at all to the users by describing old program behavior which are not in use anymore.

35.

So, the whole point of po4a is to make the documentation translation I<maintainable>. The idea is to reuse the gettext methodology to this new field. Like in gettext, texts are extracted from their original locations in order to be presented in a uniform format to the translators. The classical gettext tools help them updating their works when a new release of the original comes out. But to the difference of the classical gettext model, the translations are then re-injected in the structure of the original document so that they can be processed and distributed just like the English version.

39.

Currently, this approach has been successfully implemented to several kinds of text formatting formats:

41.

The good old manual pages' format, used by so much programs out there. The po4a support is very welcome here since this format is somewhat difficult to use and not really friendly to the newbies. The L<Locale::Po4a::Man(3pm)|Man> module also supports the mdoc format, used by the BSD man pages (they are also quite common on Linux).

43.

This is the Perl Online Documentation format. The language and extensions themselves are documented that way, as well as most of the existing Perl scripts. It makes easy to keep the documentation close to the actual code by embedding them both in the same file. It makes programmer life easier, but unfortunately, not the translator one.

45.

Even if somewhat superseded by XML nowadays, this format is still used rather often for documents which are more than a few screens long. It allows you to make complete books. Updating the translation of so long documents can reveal to be a real nightmare. diff reveals often useless when the original text was re-indented after update. Fortunately, po4a can help you in that process.