Browsing Oriya translation

34.

Translating documentation is not very difficult in itself. Texts are far longer than the messages of the program and thus take longer to be achieved, but no technical skill is really needed to do so. The difficult part comes when you have to maintain your work. Detecting which parts did change and need to be updated is very difficult, error-prone and highly unpleasant. I guess that this explains why so much translated documentation out there are outdated.

35.

The po4a answers

36.

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.

37.

Thanks to this, discovering which parts of the document were changed and need an update becomes very easy. Another good point is that the tools will make almost all the work when the structure of the original document gets fundamentally reorganized and when some chapters are moved around, merged or split. By extracting the text to translate from the document structure, it also keeps you away from the text formatting complexity and reduces your chances to get a broken document (even if it does not completely prevent you to do so).

38.

Please also see the L<FAQ> below in this document for a more complete list of the advantages and disadvantages of this approach.

39.

Supported formats

40.

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

41.

nroff

42.

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.

pod