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

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Jan 6, 2024, at 20:52, Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
>>> Date: Sat, 06 Jan 2024 05:40:38 +0000
>>> From: Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traductaire-libre.org>
>>> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>>> 
>>> But now that I understand why Eli as project maintainer does not favour
>>> PO, I am totally fine with the project’s position. We need to
>>> investigate what are the best ways to handle TeXinfo files for
>>> translation and propose guidelines to potential translators.
>> 
>> My personal preferences only matter when I do the translation.  It is
>> wrong to impose those preferences on others.  Of course, the
>> motivation to be able to work on translation in Emacs is high, but
>> whether what Emacs provides is good enough is up to each translator to
>> decide.
> 
> Since Jean-Christophe seems willing to volunteer for this work, let's
> grab that opportunity with both hands.
> 
> To be a bit more practical, here's what I'd propose:
> 
> - Continue using PO for the translations for now, in particular the
>  French one that is already using that format.

Well, I’m certainly not going to give up my setup because of the 
discussions we’ve had :), but I certainly won’t force Vincent (or 
any other person willing to work on a French translation) to follow my 
“lead”.

I know what’s good for me, but I won’t speak for others. Plus, it is 
not hard to incorporate pure texi translations into my workflow. I’m just a 
bit worried about potential diff noise between a texi to texi 
translation (Vincent’s) and a texi to po to texi one (mine). But that’s 
something I can deal with.

This discussion has prompted me to test building a short translated 
manual (GnuTLS Emacs integration). I’ve noticed a few texi things that 
need some tweaking and when I understand what it’s all about I’ll make 
suggestions.

The first one would be that all the current manuals should have the 
following directives by default:

@documentlanguage en
@documentencoding UTF-8

so that translators know that they only have to change the language, 
instead of checking which directive to add to their work.

> - Get the infrastructure in place for such translations in emacs.git.
> 
> - We can consider changing things later, if we can find or come up with
>  a better alternative to PO.

Just like I hate it when a client forces me to use a 
process/application to get a translation done, I’m sure that other 
translators have their own processes that may not involve PO. So maybe 
just indicating in a readme that there is the texi to texi route and 
also other routes like texi to po to texi for people who are already 
used to that process.

> Does that basic plan make sense?

If by “basic” you mean “let’s move on and translate” :) Yes, it does :)