Re: German translation of PostgreSQL documentation

Greetings.

The official PostgreSQL documentation has been translated to German and
has been published as a book by verlag moderne industrie/mitp
("PostgreSQL: Das offizielle Handbuch", ISBN 3-8266-1337-6, see
<http://www.mitp.de/vmi/mitp/detail/pWert/1337>). I am the translator of
this work, but let me assure you I don't get any additional money
depending on how much it sells. On the other hand, the publisher has
assured me that a certain percentage of the revenue will be donated to the
PostgreSQL project (in a manner to be decided).

Even those who are for various obvious reasons not interested in a German
language book might like to know that a lot of the editorial work that has
been done in the context of this project has been fed back into the
English original and will become public as part of the upcoming PostgreSQL
7.4 release.

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net

On Thu, Sep 25, 2003 at 01:35:40PM +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

Peter,

> The official PostgreSQL documentation has been translated to German and
> has been published as a book

Cool!

Let me ask again: how did you manage the translation? What tools did
you use? How do you plan to keep the translation up to date?

I remember the comment about keeping some kind of mark in the translated
version stating exactly which english version the translation refers to;
I'm wondering if you have considered some automatic tool for the job to
facilitate the work of finding the differences in the english version.

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]dcc.uchile.cl>)
"Pido que me den el Nobel por razones humanitarias" (Nicanor Parra)

> Even those who are for various obvious reasons not interested in a
> German
> language book might like to know that a lot of the editorial work that
> has
> been done in the context of this project has been fed back into the
> English original and will become public as part of the upcoming
> PostgreSQL
> 7.4 release.

Excellent job!

BTW I have a couple of questions about .po files:

1) I noticed that for long messages the structure is geneally the
following:

msgid ""
"some long message here"

i.e. there's an empty string after msgid and the message starts on the
next line. What's the reason for this? Is it just so that the message
can be tested against the full 80-character width without the 6
characters taken by msigid and a blank space? Does that create an extra
blank line upon output to the terminal?

My main concern is that sometimes I have a message that is much longer
in French than in English (no surprise), so I do something like this:

msgid "some message"
msgstr ""
"pretty long translation"

Is it bad to have this empty string in the translated version and not
the original?

2) how do you update .po files? I mean how do you proceed when the
original .pot file changed (say psql.pot) and you want to update your
localized version (say psql-fr.po) to find the differences? Is there a
utility to do this automatically?

Cheers.

---------------
Francois

Home page: http://www.monpetitcoin.com/

"Would Descartes have programmed in Pascal?" - Umberto Eco

Francois Suter writes:

> 1) I noticed that for long messages the structure is geneally the
> following:
>
> msgid ""
> "some long message here"

That's not problem. The strings are concatenated just like C strings
(that is, without any extra newlines introduced).

> 2) how do you update .po files? I mean how do you proceed when the
> original .pot file changed (say psql.pot) and you want to update your
> localized version (say psql-fr.po) to find the differences? Is there a
> utility to do this automatically?

Within the PostgreSQL source tree, you run "make update-po LANGUAGES=fr"
in the directory of interest (e.g., src/bin/psql) (or leave off LANGUAGES
to do for all languages, but that is typically not of interest). Check
the output to see what commands are run by make. See also the
explanations on <http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/nls.php>.

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net

Alvaro Herrera writes:

> Let me ask again: how did you manage the translation? What tools did
> you use?

No tools, just a text editor.

> How do you plan to keep the translation up to date?

There are currently no plans to do that.

> I remember the comment about keeping some kind of mark in the translated
> version stating exactly which english version the translation refers to;

Every(?) documentation source file starts with something like this:

<!--
$Header: /cvsroot/pgsql-server/doc/src/sgml/spi.sgml,v 1.27 2003/08/31 17:32:20 petere Exp $
-->

You could change this to something like

<!--
translation Header: /cvsroot/pgsql-server/doc/src/sgml/spi.sgml,v 1.27 2003/08/31 17:32:20 petere Exp $
-->

to keep track of the version that it was based on (and add your own CVS
header if you like). If you later want to update, you can look at a CVS
diff between that version and current and make adjustments.

I'm not aware of any magic available to simplify this task much. In the
end, you have to type everything yourself any way.

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net

On Thu, Sep 25, 2003 at 04:55:43PM +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

> Within the PostgreSQL source tree, you run "make update-po LANGUAGES=fr"
> in the directory of interest (e.g., src/bin/psql) (or leave off LANGUAGES
> to do for all languages, but that is typically not of interest). Check
> the output to see what commands are run by make. See also the
> explanations on <http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/nls.php>.

BTW, that page states that the way to send translation updates is
attaching the output of diff to pgsql-patches. You have said several
times already that you do not want patches, so you probably want to
change the instructions...

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]dcc.uchile.cl>)
"La naturaleza, tan frágil, tan expuesta a la muerte... y tan viva"

On Thu, Sep 25, 2003 at 05:02:43PM +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Alvaro Herrera writes:

> > [automatically manage translations of docs]

> I'm not aware of any magic available to simplify this task much. In the
> end, you have to type everything yourself any way.

Well, of course you have to type everything. But when updating the
translation, the scenario is different because a lot of text remains
exactly the same. So what the tools should provide is a mean for
detecting the parts that changed.

PostgreSQL is not the first project in translating its documents. In
fact the free desktop environments are very far ahead. The KDE guys
devised a way to convert the DocBook into PO, which is more manageable
for translation; the translated PO can be converted back to DocBook.
The PO format provides most of what's necessary to keep translations
up-to-date, as of course you already know.

I think this requires switching from SGML DocBook to XML DocBook 4.2. I
don't think it's too much to ask to change the format if it allows for
easy translation. However IIRC Rod Taylor already proposed a change to
XML some time ago and you rejected it. Would you accept the change now?

The i18n KDE group has a lot of good documentation and tools that could
be very useful to us:

http://i18n.kde.org/translation-howto/

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]dcc.uchile.cl>)
"El hombre nunca sabe de lo que es capaz hasta que lo intenta" (C. Dickens)

Alvaro Herrera writes:

> PostgreSQL is not the first project in translating its documents. In
> fact the free desktop environments are very far ahead. The KDE guys
> devised a way to convert the DocBook into PO, which is more manageable
> for translation; the translated PO can be converted back to DocBook.
> The PO format provides most of what's necessary to keep translations
> up-to-date, as of course you already know.

I've read about that too, but I don't quite see how it can work. I mean,
do you want to maintain 1000 pages of documentation via PO files? How do
you manage the document structure? But do feel free to investigate that
and report to us.

> I think this requires switching from SGML DocBook to XML DocBook 4.2. I
> don't think it's too much to ask to change the format if it allows for
> easy translation. However IIRC Rod Taylor already proposed a change to
> XML some time ago and you rejected it. Would you accept the change now?

You can convert SGML to XML automatically, so that shouldn't stop anyone.
IIRC, most proposals to upgrade the DocBook version were rejected because
they usually happened near the end of the development cycle, when people
are supposed to be working on the documentation and not be bothered with
new tools.

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net