Re: Translation of manuals (was: SES manual French translation)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Mon, 01 Jan 2024 23:11:19 +0000
> From: Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traductaire-libre.org>
> Cc: vincent.b.1@hotmail.fr, stefankangas@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org, 
> rms@gnu.org
> 
> > On Jan 2, 2024, at 1:00, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> > 
> > Finding an efficient way of updating translations of the manuals is a
> > worthy goal, but it's a separate issue.  At least in the case of
> > ses.texi (and many other manuals in doc/misc) the rate of changes is
> > quite low, as you can see from "git log".
> 
> It’s an issue I’m discussing here because you suggested that we discuss 
> translation issues here :)

I just said it's a separate issue, not that it shouldn't be discussed
here.  I started a new thread.

> > If and when you decide on doing that, I'm guessing that we will need
> > to keep the original "source" files for the translations in the Git
> > repository, and find a suitable way of producing *.texi from them.
> > I'm not sure po4a is the best alternative; we should probably consider
> > others as well and find what is best for us.
> 
> Do you have other alternatives in mind?

Not at the moment, no.  And I'm not even sure this is our
Emacs-specific problem to solve.  If the GNU Project is going to
support translations of the manuals, the ways of doing that should be
discussed project-wide, probably on then Texinfo mailing list or at
least with the participation of the Texinfo developers.

> If we were not to use an intermediate format and directly use texi, 
> we’d need a translation reference format, like TMX, but it could be 
> translated PO files, since they share a similar structure. The 
> translators would translate chunk by chunk and need a tool that 
> identifies already translated chunks from the reference format and use 
> them instead.

We could for starters invent some simple technique of our own, like
markers within the Texinfo sources that identify small enough chunks
of text, or something similar.

And again: the rate of change of the misc manuals is quite low.  If
and when someone will decide to translate the Emacs user manual or the
ELisp reference manual, then we'll have a serious problem with keeping
up with the rate of changes.  But not before that.