Re: Translation design patterns or approaches

[Oliver Corff]

Hi,

in my humble opinion, a solution to your problem (if I understood it
correctly) already exists. Perhaps a good starting point for writing
useful macros which output the desired text according to language is the
macro repository of groff.

Check, e.g. the macro files trans.tmac, de.tmac, sv.tmac, cs.tmac,
fr.tmac etc.in /usr/share/groff/1.23.0/tmac

They demonstrate the mechanism how you can use string macros with good
mnemonic names that issue the names of months, days etc. according to
selected language, including a lot of phrases necessary for writing letters.

Best,

Oliver.


On 08/11/2024 20:12, Bento Borges Schirmer wrote:
> Hey Adam and onf,
>
> Thanks for the suggestion about po4a, it is good to know such thing
> exists. But I didn't find any examples about it and I was not in the
> mood to understand it, so I tried to be creative!
>
> I kludged together the switch case example from groff documentation
> [1] and now I have this in the top of my source:
>
> .ds EN
> .ds PT
> .ie !d lang \{\
> .de PT
> .ds text \\$*
> ..
> .\}
> .el \{.ie '\*[lang]'pt' \{\
> .de PT
> .ds text \\$*
> ..
> .\}
> .el \{.ie '\*[lang]'en' \{\
> .de EN
> .ds text \\$*
> ..
> .\}
> .el .ds title \" empty
> .\}\}\}
>
> My intent is to define one macro for each language, but only one of
> them works and the remainder becomes no-ops. The user must pass the
> flag e.g. -d lang=en to groff to enable english, otherwise the
> defaults to portuguese. So now I'm rewriting my CV like this:
>
> .EN Education
> .PT Educação
> .RLD 12p
> .HEADING 1 "\*[text]"
>
> And:
>
> .ITEM
> .PT Ferramentas de escritório
> .EN Office tools
> \*[text]:
> .PT e
> .EN and
> Microsoft Word \*[text] PowerPoint, \*[text] Google Forms
> .LIST OFF
>
> And:
>
> .LIST USER "\(en\ "
> .ITEM
> .PT Desenvolveu \fIfront end\fP em React e \fIback end\fP com AWS Lambda
> .EN Developed front end in React and back end with AWS Lambda
> \*[text]
> .LIST OFF
>
> Working okay so far. I will finish translating my CV and pray nothing
> goes wrong lol
>
> Best regards,
> Bento
>
> [1]https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/groff.html.node/Conditional-Blocks.html
>
> Em sex., 8 de nov. de 2024 às 11:09, Adam Sampson<ats@offog.org> escreveu:
> > Bento Borges Schirmer<bbschirmer@inf.ufsm.br> writes:
> >
> > > I want to translate my CV to english. [...] Do you know any design
> > > pattern, macro set or preprocessor that could handle this task in a
> > > manageable way?
> > po4a (https://po4a.org/, packaged in most distributions already) is one
> > approach to this -- you write the document in your preferred source
> > language, then use gettext translations to specify how it's translated
> > into other languages.
> >
> > This makes it reasonably easy to keep the translation up to date when
> > changes are made, because you can see what new phrases have been added
> > to the list of translations. (It's also convenient if you're already
> > using gettext in a project to translate strings in code.)
> >
> > However, it needs to have an understanding of the document structure to
> > pull out phrases for translation, and while it supports man/mdoc already
> > it might not understand enough general groff for your purposes...
> >
> > --
> > Adam Sampson<ats@offog.org>                         <http://offog.org/>
--

Dr. Oliver Corff
Mail:oliver.corff@email.de