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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 02 Jan 2024 13:16:53 +0000
> From: Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traductaire-libre.org>
> Cc: Vincent Belaïche <vincent.b.1@hotmail.fr>, stefankangas@gmail.com, 
> emacs-devel@gnu.org, rms@gnu.org
> 
> > 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.
> 
> The GNU project is already supporting translation of documentation.
> 
> https://translationproject.org/extra/matrix.html
> 
> (TexInfo is there too)

AFAIK, that matrix shows the state of translation of message catalogs
of each project, which is not what we are talking about here.  If I'm
wrong, would you mind pointing me at the translated Info manuals of
the projects in the matrix?

> >> 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.
> 
> Markers are already here (TexInfo commands, end of sentence markers, 
> etc.).

I meant markers specifically for translators, so that it would be easy
to detect chunk(s) of text that was/were modified, and update their
translations.

> Some commands in TexInfo have translatable contents, others do not.

I didn't mean Texinfo commands, I meant mainly the plain text which is
85% of any Texinfo manual.

> Honestly, the easiest way to handle the translation of Emacs documents 
> would be to contact the TP project manager and to discuss what’s the 
> best way to do that, while thinking of what kind of infrastructure we 
> want on the emacs side to handle how to store/build all the translations.

That could also be a good idea.  Although TP is AFAIK mainly busy with
translating short messages, not large manuals of the kind we have in
Emacs.