Re: SES manual French translation (Re: Where to contribute manual translations ?)

[Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traductaire-libre.org>]

> On Jan 1, 2024, at 21:22, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
>> Date: Mon, 01 Jan 2024 07:57:01 +0000
>> From: Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traductaire-libre.org>
>> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,
>> "stefankangas@gmail.com" <stefankangas@gmail.com>,
>> "emacs-devel@gnu.org" <emacs-devel@gnu.org>, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
>> 
>> It seems like you left French parts in the English manual as "todo
>> items".
>> 
>> For ex. l.168-210.
>> 
>> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/doc/misc/ses.texi#n168
>> 
>> Even if they're tagged as @ignore, I'm not sure that's good practice
>> for potential translators to other languages.
> 
> Those should be moved to ses-fr.texi, possibly together with the
> original English text and some references to it.  Keeping those
> comments in ses.texi is not TRT.

TRT? The right thing?

>> The Savannah project is dead. We can create another one, discuss our
>> issues there and push the deliverables to the Emacs repo when they are
>> ready.
> 
> Why not discuss it here and install any changes you agree upon
> directly?  I'd prefer not to have a separate intermediate repository,
> as that would complicate maintenance, especially if other French
> speakers join the effort.

Sure. I don’t see any problem discussing French grammatical issues here 
and having committers directly install files, of course.

My opinion is that translators should not work directly in texi format, 
for the reasons that I mentioned earlier in the thread, namely because 
emacs documentation evolves quickly and all the problems identified in 
such localization/translation processes have found solutions with PO 
based translation processes.

If we were to have a robust translation process within the emacs 
repository (and there is no reason why we can’t, since all the major 
free software endeavours around have one), we’d need an intermediate 
location where PO files are generated (with po4a) as the documentation 
evolves. And translators would update the translations found there, and 
there would be a process that converts back the translations to texi 
and puts them in the proper location (the one that was decided upon 
here).

If we were to do that within the emacs repository/development process 
that would mean adding a dependency to po4a, having an automated 
process that triggers po4a when a documentation file is modified, 
triggering po4a when a po has been committed to convert the file back 
to texi, and copying the proper files to the emacs docs files hierarchy.

Or maybe we could have that done manually (I could install the PO files 
in a dedicated repository when I see modifications to a file).

I’m talking about that when I say “other repository”. What I’m doing in 
my repo is basically providing PO files semi-regularly to people who are 
interested and I happen to translate the PO files in OmegaT (but that’s 
not relevant to the process really since one could use po-mode in emacs). 
It’s also the way other projects work. They “delegate” the process to 
specialized localization groups and each group has a few committers 
that handle the installation in the “mother” project.


-- 
Jean-Christophe Helary @jchelary@emacs.ch
https://traductaire-libre.org
https://mac4translators.blogspot.com
https://sr.ht/~brandelune/omegat-as-a-book/