Browsing Portuguese translation

31.

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.

32.

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 Outdated translation can reveal worse than no translation at all to the users by describing old program behavior which are not in use anymore.

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 I guess that this explains why so much translated documentation out there are outdated.

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).

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).

44.

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.

46.

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.

47.

Currently, only the debiandoc and docbook DTD are supported, but adding support to a new one is really easy. It is even possible to use po4a on an unknown sgml dtd without changing the code by providing the needed information on the command line. See L<Locale::Po4a::Sgml(3pm)> for details.

56.

Po4a can also handle some more rare or specialized formats, such as the documentation of compilation options for the 2.4.x kernels or the diagrams produced by the dia tool. Adding a new one is often very easy and the main task is to come up with a parser of your target format. See L<Locale::Po4a::TransTractor(3pm)> for more information about this.