1PO4A(7) Po4a Tools PO4A(7)
2
6 po4a - framework to translate documentation and other materials
7
9 The po4a (PO for anything) project goal is to ease translations (and
10 more interestingly, the maintenance of translations) using gettext
11 tools on areas where they were not expected like documentation.
12
14 This document is organized as follow:
15 1 Why should I use po4a? What is it good for?
17 This introducing chapter explains the motivation of the project and
18 its philosophy. You should read it first if you are in the process
19 of evaluating po4a for your own translations.
20 2 How to use po4a?
22 This chapter is a sort of reference manual, trying to answer the
23 users' questions and to give you a better understanding of the
24 whole process. This introduces how to do things with po4a and serve
25 as an introduction to the documentation of the specific tools.
26 HOWTO begin a new translation?
28 HOWTO change the translation back to a documentation file?
29 HOWTO update a po4a translation?
30 HOWTO convert a pre-existing translation to po4a?
31 HOWTO add extra text to translations (like translator's name)?
32 HOWTO do all this in one program invocation?
33 HOWTO customize po4a?
34 3 How does it work?
35 This chapter gives you a brief overview of the po4a internals, so
36 that you may feel more confident to help us maintaining and
37 improving it. It may also help you understanding why it does not do
38 what you expected, and how to solve your problems.
39 4 FAQ
41 This chapter groups the Frequently Asked Questions. In fact, most
42 of the questions for now could be formulated that way: "Why is it
43 designed this way, and not that one?" If you think po4a isn't the
44 right answer to documentation translation, you should consider
45 reading this section. If it does not answer your question, please
46 contact us on the <po4a-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org> mailing
47 list. We love feedback.
48 5 Specific notes about modules
50 This chapter presents the specificities of each module from the
51 translator and original author's point of view. Read this to learn
52 the syntax you will encounter when translating stuff in this
53 module, or the rules you should follow in your original document to
54 make translators' life easier.
55 Actually, this section is not really part of this document.
57 Instead, it is placed in each module's documentation. This helps
58 ensuring that the information is up to date by keeping the
59 documentation and the code together.
60
62 I like the idea of open-source software, making it possible for
63 everybody to access software and its source code. But being French, I'm
64 well aware that the licensing is not the only restriction to the
65 openness of software: non-translated free software is useless for non-
66 English speakers, and we still have some work to make it available to
67 really everybody out there.
68 The perception of this situation by the open-source actors did
70 dramatically improve recently. We, as translators, won the first battle
71 and convinced everybody of the translations' importance. But
72 unfortunately, it was the easy part. Now, we have to do the job and
73 actually translate all this stuff.
74 Actually, open-source software themselves benefit of a rather decent
76 level of translation, thanks to the wonderful gettext tool suite. It is
77 able to extract the strings to translate from the program, present a
78 uniform format to translators, and then use the result of their works
79 at run time to display translated messages to the user.
80 But the situation is rather different when it comes to documentation.
82 Too often, the translated documentation is not visible enough (not
83 distributed as a part of the program), only partial, or not up to date.
84 This last situation is by far the worst possible one. Outdated
85 translation can reveal worse than no translation at all to the users by
86 describing old program behavior which are not in use anymore.
87 The problem to solve
89 Translating documentation is not very difficult in itself. Texts are
90 far longer than the messages of the program and thus take longer to be
91 achieved, but no technical skill is really needed to do so. The
92 difficult part comes when you have to maintain your work. Detecting
93 which parts did change and need to be updated is very difficult, error-
94 prone and highly unpleasant. I guess that this explains why so much
95 translated documentation out there are outdated.
96 The po4a answers
98 So, the whole point of po4a is to make the documentation translation
99 maintainable. The idea is to reuse the gettext methodology to this new
100 field. Like in gettext, texts are extracted from their original
101 locations in order to be presented in a uniform format to the
102 translators. The classical gettext tools help them updating their works
103 when a new release of the original comes out. But to the difference of
104 the classical gettext model, the translations are then re-injected in
105 the structure of the original document so that they can be processed
106 and distributed just like the English version.
107 Thanks to this, discovering which parts of the document were changed
109 and need an update becomes very easy. Another good point is that the
110 tools will make almost all the work when the structure of the original
111 document gets fundamentally reorganized and when some chapters are
112 moved around, merged or split. By extracting the text to translate from
113 the document structure, it also keeps you away from the text formatting
114 complexity and reduces your chances to get a broken document (even if
115 it does not completely prevent you to do so).
116 Please also see the FAQ below in this document for a more complete list
118 of the advantages and disadvantages of this approach.
119 Supported formats
121 Currently, this approach has been successfully implemented to several
122 kinds of text formatting formats:
123 man
125 The good old manual pages' format, used by so much programs out there.
127 The po4a support is very welcome here since this format is somewhat
128 difficult to use and not really friendly to the newbies. The
129 Locale::Po4a::Man(3pm) module also supports the mdoc format, used by
130 the BSD man pages (they are also quite common on Linux).
131 pod
133 This is the Perl Online Documentation format. The language and
135 extensions themselves are documented that way, as well as most of the
136 existing Perl scripts. It makes easy to keep the documentation close to
137 the actual code by embedding them both in the same file. It makes
138 programmer life easier, but unfortunately, not the translator one.
139 sgml
141 Even if somewhat superseded by XML nowadays, this format is still used
143 rather often for documents which are more than a few screens long. It
144 allows you to make complete books. Updating the translation of so long
145 documents can reveal to be a real nightmare. diff reveals often useless
146 when the original text was re-indented after update. Fortunately, po4a
147 can help you in that process.
148 Currently, only the DebianDoc and DocBook DTD are supported, but adding
150 support to a new one is really easy. It is even possible to use po4a on
151 an unknown SGML DTD without changing the code by providing the needed
152 information on the command line. See Locale::Po4a::Sgml(3pm) for
153 details.
154 TeX / LaTeX
156 The LaTeX format is a major documentation format used in the Free
158 Software world and for publications. The Locale::Po4a::LaTeX(3pm)
159 module was tested with the Python documentation, a book and some
160 presentations.
161 texinfo
163 All the GNU documentation is written in this format (that's even one of
165 the requirement to become an official GNU project). The support for
166 Locale::Po4a::Texinfo(3pm) in po4a is still at the beginning. Please
167 report bugs and feature requests.
168 xml
170 The XML format is a base format for many documentation formats.
172 Currently, the DocBook DTD is supported by po4a. See
174 Locale::Po4a::Docbook(3pm) for details.
175 others
177 Po4a can also handle some more rare or specialized formats, such as the
179 documentation of compilation options for the 2.4.x kernels or the
180 diagrams produced by the dia tool. Adding a new one is often very easy
181 and the main task is to come up with a parser of your target format.
182 See Locale::Po4a::TransTractor(3pm) for more information about this.
183 Unsupported formats
185 Unfortunately, po4a still lacks support for several documentation
186 formats.
187 There is a whole bunch of other formats we would like to support in
189 po4a, and not only documentation ones. Indeed, we aim at plugging all
190 "market holes" left by the classical gettext tools. It encompass
191 package descriptions (deb and rpm), package installation scripts
192 questions, package changelogs, and all specialized file formats used by
193 the programs such as game scenarios or wine resource files.
194
196 This chapter is a sort of reference manual, trying to answer the users'
197 questions and to give you a better understanding of the whole process.
198 This introduces how to do things with po4a and serve as an introduction
199 to the documentation of the specific tools.
200 Graphical overview
202 The following schema gives an overview of the process of translating
203 documentation using po4a. Do not be afraid by its apparent complexity,
204 it comes from the fact that the whole process is represented here. Once
205 you converted your project to po4a, only the right part of the graphic
206 is relevant.
207 Note that master.doc is taken as an example for the documentation to be
209 translated and translation.doc is the corresponding translated text.
210 The suffix could be .pod, .xml, or .sgml depending on its format. Each
211 part of the picture will be detailed in the next sections.
212 master.doc
214 |
215 V
216 +<-----<----+<-----<-----<--------+------->-------->-------+
217 : | | :
218 {translation} | { update of master.doc } :
219 : | | :
220 XX.doc | V V
221 (optional) | master.doc ->-------->------>+
222 : | (new) |
223 V V | |
224 [po4a-gettextize] doc.XX.po--->+ | |
225 | (old) | | |
226 | ^ V V |
227 | | [po4a-updatepo] |
228 V | | V
229 translation.pot ^ V |
230 | | doc.XX.po |
231 | | (fuzzy) |
232 { translation } | | |
233 | ^ V V
234 | | {manual editing} |
235 | | | |
236 V | V V
237 doc.XX.po --->---->+<---<---- doc.XX.po addendum master.doc
238 (initial) (up-to-date) (optional) (up-to-date)
239 : | | |
240 : V | |
241 +----->----->----->------> + | |
242 | | |
243 V V V
244 +------>-----+------<------+
245 |
246 V
247 [po4a-translate]
248 |
249 V
250 XX.doc
251 (up-to-date)
252 On the left part, the conversion of a translation not using po4a to
254 this system is shown. On the top of the right part, the action of the
255 original author is depicted (updating the documentation). The middle
256 of the right part is where the automatic actions of po4a are depicted.
257 The new material are extracted, and compared against the exiting
258 translation. Parts which didn't change are found, and previous
259 translation is used. Parts which where partially modified are also
260 connected to the previous translation, but with a specific marker
261 indicating that the translation must be updated. The bottom of the
262 figure shows how a formatted document is built.
263 Actually, as a translator, the only manual operation you have to do is
265 the part marked {manual editing}. Yeah, I'm sorry, but po4a helps you
266 translate. It does not translate anything for you...
267 HOWTO begin a new translation?
269 This section presents the needed steps required to begin a new
270 translation with po4a. The refinements involved in converting an
271 existing project to this system are detailed in the relevant section.
272 To begin a new translation using po4a, you have to do the following
274 steps:
275 - Extract the text which have to be translated from the original
277 <master.doc> document into a new translation template
278 <translation.pot> file (the gettext format). For that, use the
279 po4a-gettextize program this way:
280 $ po4a-gettextize -f <format> -m <master.doc> -p <translation.pot>
282 <format> is naturally the format used in the master.doc document. As
284 expected, the output goes into translation.pot. Please refer to
285 po4a-gettextize(1) for more details about the existing options.
286 - Actually translate what should be translated. For that, you have to
288 rename the POT file for example to doc.XX.po (where XX is the ISO639
289 code of the language you are translating to, e.g. fr for French), and
290 edit the resulting file. It is often a good idea to not name the file
291 XX.po to avoid confusion with the translation of the program
292 messages, but this your call. Don't forget to update the PO file
293 headers, they are important.
294 The actual translation can be done using the Emacs' or Vi's PO mode,
296 Lokalize (KDE based), Gtranslator (GNOME based) or whichever program
297 you prefer to use for them (e.g. Virtaal).
298 If you wish to learn more about this, you definitively need to refer
300 to the gettext documentation, available in the gettext-doc package.
301 HOWTO change the translation back to a documentation file?
303 Once you're done with the translation, you want to get the translated
304 documentation and distribute it to users along with the original one.
305 For that, use the po4a-translate(1) program like that (where XX is the
306 language code):
307 $ po4a-translate -f <format> -m <master.doc> -p <doc.XX.po> -l <XX.doc>
309 As before, <format> is the format used in the master.doc document. But
311 this time, the PO file provided with the -p flag is part of the input.
312 This is your translation. The output goes into XX.doc.
313 Please refer to po4a-translate(1) for more details.
315 HOWTO update a po4a translation?
317 To update your translation when the original master.doc file has
318 changed, use the po4a-updatepo(1) program like that:
319 $ po4a-updatepo -f <format> -m <new_master.doc> -p <old_doc.XX.po>
321 (Please refer to po4a-updatepo(1) for more details)
323 Naturally, the new paragraph in the document won't get magically
325 translated in the PO file with this operation, and you'll need to
326 update the PO file manually. Likewise, you may have to rework the
327 translation for paragraphs which were modified a bit. To make sure you
328 won't miss any of them, they are marked as "fuzzy" during the process
329 and you have to remove this marker before the translation can be used
330 by po4a-translate. As for the initial translation, the best is to use
331 your favorite PO editor here.
332 Once your PO file is up-to-date again, without any untranslated or
334 fuzzy string left, you can generate a translated documentation file, as
335 explained in the previous section.
336 HOWTO convert a pre-existing translation to po4a?
338 Often, you used to translate manually the document happily until a
339 major reorganization of the original master.doc document happened.
340 Then, after some unpleasant tries with diff or similar tools, you want
341 to convert to po4a. But of course, you don't want to loose your
342 existing translation in the process. Don't worry, this case is also
343 handled by po4a tools and is called gettextization.
344 The key here is to have the same structure in the translated document
346 and in the original one so that the tools can match the content
347 accordingly.
348 If you are lucky (i.e., if the structures of both documents perfectly
350 match), it will work seamlessly and you will be set in a few seconds.
351 Otherwise, you may understand why this process has such an ugly name,
352 and you'd better be prepared to some grunt work here. In any case,
353 remember that it is the price to pay to get the comfort of po4a
354 afterward. And the good point is that you have to do so only once.
355 I cannot emphasis this too much. In order to ease the process, it is
357 thus important that you find the exact version which were used to do
358 the translation. The best situation is when you noted down the VCS
359 revision used for the translation and you didn't modify it in the
360 translation process, so that you can use it.
361 It won't work well when you use the updated original text with the old
363 translation. It remains possible, but is harder and really should be
364 avoided if possible. In fact, I guess that if you fail to find the
365 original text again, the best solution is to find someone to do the
366 gettextization for you (but, please, not me ;).
367 Maybe I'm too dramatic here. Even when things go wrong, it remains ways
369 faster than translating everything again. I was able to gettextize the
370 existing French translation of the Perl documentation in one day, even
371 though things did went wrong. That was more than two megabytes of text,
372 and a new translation would have lasted months or more.
373 Let me explain the basis of the procedure first and I will come back on
375 hints to achieve it when the process goes wrong. To ease comprehension,
376 let's use above example once again.
377 Once you have the old master.doc again which matches with the
379 translation XX.doc, the gettextization can be done directly to the PO
380 file doc.XX.po without manual translation of translation.pot file:
381 $ po4a-gettextize -f <format> -m <old_master.doc> -l <XX.doc> -p <doc.XX.po>
383 When you're lucky, that's it. You converted your old translation to
385 po4a and can begin with the updating task right away. Just follow the
386 procedure explained a few section ago to synchronize your PO file with
387 the newest original document, and update the translation accordingly.
388 Please note that even when things seem to work properly, there is still
390 room for errors in this process. The point is that po4a is unable to
391 understand the text to make sure that the translation match the
392 original. That's why all strings are marked as "fuzzy" in the process.
393 You should check each of them carefully before removing those markers.
394 Often the document structures don't match exactly, preventing
396 po4a-gettextize from doing its job properly. At that point, the whole
397 game is about editing the files to get their damn structures matching.
398 It may help to read the section Gettextization: how does it work?
400 below. Understanding the internal process will help you to make this
401 work. The good point is that po4a-gettextize is rather verbose about
402 what went wrong when it happens. First, it pinpoints where in the
403 documents the structures' discrepancies are. You will learn the strings
404 that don't match, their positions in the text, and the type of each of
405 them. Moreover, the PO file generated so far will be dumped to
406 gettextization.failed.po.
407 - Remove all extra parts of the translations, such as the section in
409 which you give the translator name and thank every people who
410 contributed to the translation. Addenda, which are described in the
411 next section, will allow you to re-add them afterward.
412 - Do not hesitate to edit both the original and the translation. The
414 most important thing is to get the PO file. You will be able to
415 update it afterward. That being said, editing the translation
416 should be preferred when both are possible since it makes things
417 easier when the gettextization is done.
418 - If needed, kill some parts of the original if they happen to not be
420 translated. When synchronizing the PO with the document afterward,
421 they will come back from themselves.
422 - If you changed the structure a bit (to merge two paragraphs, or
424 split another one), undo those changes. If there are issues in the
425 original, you should inform the original author. Fixing them in
426 your translation only fixes them for a part of the community. And
427 moreover, it's impossible when using po4a ;)
428 - Sometimes, the paragraph content does match, but their types don't.
430 Fixing it is rather format-dependant. In POD and man, it often
431 comes from the fact that one of the two contains a line beginning
432 with a white space where the other doesn't. In those formats, such
433 paragraph cannot be wrapped and thus become a different type. Just
434 remove the space and you are fine. It may also be a typo in the tag
435 name.
436 Likewise, two paragraphs may get merged together in POD when the
438 separating line contains some spaces, or when there is no empty
439 line before the =item line and the content of the item.
440 - Sometimes, there is a desynchronization between the files, and the
442 translation is attached to the wrong original paragraph. It is the
443 sign that the real problem was before in the files. Check
444 gettextization.failed.po to see when the desynchronization begins,
445 and fix it there.
446 - Sometimes, you get the strong feeling that po4a ate some parts of
448 the text, either the original or the translation.
449 gettextization.failed.po indicates that both of them where gently
450 matching, and then the gettextization fails because it tried to
451 match one paragraph with the one after (or before) the right one,
452 as if the right one disappeared. Curse po4a as I did when it first
453 happened to me. Generously.
454 This unfortunate situation happens when the same paragraph is
456 repeated over the document. In that case, no new entry is created
457 in the PO file, but a new reference is added to the existing one
458 instead.
459 So, when the same paragraph appears twice in the original but both
461 are not translated in the exact same way each time, you will get
462 the feeling that a paragraph of the original disappeared. Just kill
463 the new translation. If you prefer to kill the first translation
464 instead when it was actually better, remove the second one from
465 where it is and put it in place of the first one.
466 In the contrary, if two similar but different paragraphs were
468 translated in the exact same way, you will get the feeling that a
469 paragraph of the translation disappeared. A solution is to add a
470 stupid string to the original paragraph (such as "I'm different").
471 Don't be afraid, those things will disappear during the
472 synchronization, and when the added text is short enough, gettext
473 will match your translation to the existing text (marking it as
474 fuzzy, but you don't really care since all strings are fuzzy after
475 gettextization).
476 Hopefully, those tips will help you making your gettextization work and
478 obtain your precious PO file. You are now ready to synchronize your
479 file and begin your translation. Please note that on large text, it may
480 happen that the first synchronization takes a long time.
481 For example, the first po4a-updatepo of the Perl documentation's French
483 translation (5.5 Mb PO file) took about two days full on a 1Ghz G5
484 computer. Yes, 48 hours. But the subsequent ones only take a dozen of
485 seconds on my old laptop. This is because the first time, most of the
486 msgid of the PO file don't match any of the POT file ones. This forces
487 gettext to search for the closest one using a costly string proximity
488 algorithm.
489 HOWTO add extra text to translations (like translator's name)?
491 Because of the gettext approach, doing this becomes more difficult in
492 po4a than it was when simply editing a new file along the original one.
493 But it remains possible, thanks to the so-called addenda.
494 It may help the comprehension to consider addenda as a sort of patches
496 applied to the localized document after processing. They are rather
497 different from the usual patches (they have only one line of context,
498 which can embed Perl regular expression, and they can only add new text
499 without removing any), but the functionalities are the same.
500 Their goal is to allow the translator to add extra content to the
502 document which is not translated from the original document. The most
503 common usage is to add a section about the translation itself, listing
504 contributors and explaining how to report bug against the translation.
505 An addendum must be provided as a separate file. The first line
507 constitutes a header indicating where in the produced document they
508 should be placed. The rest of the addendum file will be added verbatim
509 at the determined position of the resulting document.
510 The header has a pretty rigid syntax: It must begin with the string
512 PO4A-HEADER:, followed by a semi-colon (;) separated list of key=value
513 fields. White spaces ARE important. Note that you cannot use the semi-
514 colon char (;) in the value, and that quoting it doesn't help.
515 Again, it sounds scary, but the examples given below should help you to
517 find how to write the header line you need. To illustrate the
518 discussion, assume we want to add a section called "About this
519 translation" after the "About this document" one.
520 Here are the possible header keys:
522 position (mandatory)
524 a regexp. The addendum will be placed near the line matching this
525 regexp. Note that we're speaking about the translated document
526 here, not the original. If more than a line match this expression
527 (or none), the addition will fail. It is indeed better to report an
528 error than inserting the addendum at the wrong location.
529 This line is called position point in the following. The point
531 where the addendum is added is called insertion point. Those two
532 points are near one from another, but not equal. For example, if
533 you want to insert a new section, it is easier to put the position
534 point on the title of the preceding section and explain po4a where
535 the section ends (remember that position point is given by a regexp
536 which should match a unique line).
537 The localization of the insertion point with regard to the position
539 point is controlled by the mode, beginboundary and endboundary
540 fields, as explained below.
541 In our case, we would have:
543 position=<title>About this document</title>
545 mode (mandatory)
547 It can be either the string before or after, specifying the
548 position of the addendum, relative to the position point.
549 Since we want the new section to be placed below the one we are
551 matching, we have:
552 mode=after
554 beginboundary (used only when mode=after, and mandatory in that case)
556 endboundary (idem)
557 regexp matching the end of the section after which the addendum
558 goes.
559 When mode=after, the insertion point is after the position point,
561 but not directly after! It is placed at the end of the section
562 beginning at the position point, i.e., after or before the line
563 matched by the ???boundary argument, depending on whether you used
564 beginboundary or endboundary.
565 In our case, we can choose to indicate the end of the section we
567 match by adding:
568 endboundary=</section>
570 or to indicate the beginning of the next section by indicating:
572 beginboundary=<section>
574 In both case, our addendum will be placed after the </section> and
576 before the <section>. The first one is better since it will work
577 even if the document gets reorganized.
578 Both forms exist because documentation formats are different. In
580 some of them, there is a way to mark the end of a section (just
581 like the </section> we just used), while some other don't
582 explicitly mark the end of section (like in man). In the former
583 case, you want to make a boundary matching the end of a section, so
584 that the insertion point comes after it. In the latter case, you
585 want to make a boundary matching the beginning of the next section,
586 so that the insertion point comes just before it.
587 This can seem obscure, but hopefully, the next examples will enlighten
589 you.
590 To sum up the example we used so far, in order to add a section called
592 "About this translation" after the "About this document" one in a SGML
593 document, you can use either of those header lines:
594 PO4A-HEADER: mode=after; position=About this document; endboundary=</section>
595 PO4A-HEADER: mode=after; position=About this document; beginboundary=<section>
596 If you want to add something after the following nroff section:
598 .SH "AUTHORS"
599 you should put a position matching this line, and a beginboundary
601 matching the beginning of the next section (i.e., ^\.SH). The
602 addendum will then be added after the position point and immediately
603 before the first line matching the beginboundary. That is to say:
604 PO4A-HEADER:mode=after;position=AUTHORS;beginboundary=\.SH
606 If you want to add something into a section (like after "Copyright Big
608 Dude") instead of adding a whole section, give a position matching this
609 line, and give a beginboundary matching any line.
610 PO4A-HEADER:mode=after;position=Copyright Big Dude, 2004;beginboundary=^
611 If you want to add something at the end of the document, give a
613 position matching any line of your document (but only one line. Po4a
614 won't proceed if it's not unique), and give an endboundary matching
615 nothing. Don't use simple strings here like "EOF", but prefer those
616 which have less chance to be in your document.
617 PO4A-HEADER:mode=after;position=<title>About</title>;beginboundary=FakePo4aBoundary
618 In any case, remember that these are regexp. For example, if you want
620 to match the end of a nroff section ending with the line
621 .fi
623 don't use .fi as endboundary, because it will match with "the[ fi]le",
625 which is obviously not what you expect. The correct endboundary in that
626 case is: ^\.fi$.
627 If the addendum doesn't go where you expected, try to pass the -vv
629 argument to the tools, so that they explain you what they do while
630 placing the addendum.
631 More detailed example
633 Original document (POD formatted):
635 |=head1 NAME
637 |
638 |dummy - a dummy program
639 |
640 |=head1 AUTHOR
641 |
642 |me
643 Then, the following addendum will ensure that a section (in French)
645 about the translator is added at the end of the file. (in French,
646 "TRADUCTEUR" means "TRANSLATOR", and "moi" means "me")
647 |PO4A-HEADER:mode=after;position=AUTEUR;beginboundary=^=head
649 |
650 |=head1 TRADUCTEUR
651 |
652 |moi
653 In order to put your addendum before the AUTHOR, use the following
655 header:
656 PO4A-HEADER:mode=after;position=NOM;beginboundary=^=head1
658 This works because the next line matching the beginboundary /^=head1/
660 after the section "NAME" (translated to "NOM" in French), is the one
661 declaring the authors. So, the addendum will be put between both
662 sections.
663 HOWTO do all this in one program invocation?
665 The use of po4a proved to be a bit error prone for the users since you
666 have to call two different programs in the right order (po4a-updatepo
667 and then po4a-translate), each of them needing more than 3 arguments.
668 Moreover, it was difficult with this system to use only one PO file for
669 all your documents when more than one format was used.
670 The po4a(1) program was designed to solve those difficulties. Once your
672 project is converted to the system, you write a simple configuration
673 file explaining where your translation files are (PO and POT), where
674 the original documents are, their formats and where their translations
675 should be placed.
676 Then, calling po4a(1) on this file ensures that the PO files are
678 synchronized against the original document, and that the translated
679 document are generated properly. Of course, you will want to call this
680 program twice: once before editing the PO file to update them and once
681 afterward to get a completely updated translated document. But you only
682 need to remember one command line.
683 HOWTO customize po4a?
685 po4a modules have options (specified with the -o option) that can be
686 used to change the module behavior.
687 It is also possible to customize a module or new / derivative /
689 modified modules by putting a module in lib/Locale/Po4a/, and adding
690 lib to the paths specified by the PERLLIB or PERL5LIB environment. For
691 example:
692 PERLLIB=$PWD/lib po4a --previous po4a/po4a.cfg
694 Note: the actual name of the lib directory is not important.
696
698 This chapter gives you a brief overview of the po4a internals, so that
699 you may feel more confident to help us maintaining and improving it. It
700 may also help you understanding why it does not do what you expected,
701 and how to solve your problems.
702 What's the big picture here?
704 The po4a architecture is object oriented (in Perl. Isn't that neat?).
705 The common ancestor to all parser classes is called TransTractor. This
706 strange name comes from the fact that it is at the same time in charge
707 of translating document and extracting strings.
708 More formally, it takes a document to translate plus a PO file
710 containing the translations to use as input while producing two
711 separate outputs: Another PO file (resulting of the extraction of
712 translatable strings from the input document), and a translated
713 document (with the same structure than the input one, but with all
714 translatable strings replaced with content of the input PO). Here is a
715 graphical representation of this:
716 Input document --\ /---> Output document
718 \ TransTractor:: / (translated)
719 +-->-- parse() --------+
720 / \
721 Input PO --------/ \---> Output PO
722 (extracted)
723 This little bone is the core of all the po4a architecture. If you omit
725 the input PO and the output document, you get po4a-gettextize. If you
726 provide both input and disregard the output PO, you get po4a-translate.
727 TransTractor::parse() is a virtual function implemented by each module.
729 Here is a little example to show you how it works. It parses a list of
730 paragraphs, each of them beginning with <p>.
731 1 sub parse {
733 2 PARAGRAPH: while (1) {
734 3 $my ($paragraph,$pararef,$line,$lref)=("","","","");
735 4 $my $first=1;
736 5 while (($line,$lref)=$document->shiftline() && defined($line)) {
737 6 if ($line =~ m/<p>/ && !$first--; ) {
738 7 $document->unshiftline($line,$lref);
739 8
740 9 $paragraph =~ s/^<p>//s;
741 10 $document->pushline("<p>".$document->translate($paragraph,$pararef));
742 11
743 12 next PARAGRAPH;
744 13 } else {
745 14 $paragraph .= $line;
746 15 $pararef = $lref unless(length($pararef));
747 16 }
748 17 }
749 18 return; # Did not got a defined line? End of input file.
750 19 }
751 20 }
752 On line 6, we encounter <p> for the second time. That's the signal of
754 the next paragraph. We should thus put the just obtained line back into
755 the original document (line 7) and push the paragraph built so far into
756 the outputs. After removing the leading <p> of it on line 9, we push
757 the concatenation of this tag with the translation of the rest of the
758 paragraph.
759 This translate() function is very cool. It pushes its argument into the
761 output PO file (extraction) and returns its translation as found in the
762 input PO file (translation). Since it's used as part of the argument of
763 pushline(), this translation lands into the output document.
764 Isn't that cool? It is possible to build a complete po4a module in less
766 than 20 lines when the format is simple enough...
767 You can learn more about this in Locale::Po4a::TransTractor(3pm).
769 Gettextization: how does it work?
771 The idea here is to take the original document and its translation, and
772 to say that the Nth extracted string from the translation is the
773 translation of the Nth extracted string from the original. In order to
774 work, both files must share exactly the same structure. For example, if
775 the files have the following structure, it is very unlikely that the
776 4th string in translation (of type 'chapter') is the translation of the
777 4th string in original (of type 'paragraph').
778 Original Translation
780 chapter chapter
782 paragraph paragraph
783 paragraph paragraph
784 paragraph chapter
785 chapter paragraph
786 paragraph paragraph
787 For that, po4a parsers are used on both the original and the
789 translation files to extract PO files, and then a third PO file is
790 built from them taking strings from the second as translation of
791 strings from the first. In order to check that the strings we put
792 together are actually the translations of each other, document parsers
793 in po4a should put information about the syntactical type of extracted
794 strings in the document (all existing ones do so, yours should also).
795 Then, this information is used to make sure that both documents have
796 the same syntax. In the previous example, it would allow us to detect
797 that string 4 is a paragraph in one case, and a chapter title in
798 another case and to report the problem.
799 In theory, it would be possible to detect the problem, and
801 resynchronize the files afterward (just like diff does). But what we
802 should do of the few strings before desynchronizations is not clear,
803 and it would produce bad results some times. That's why the current
804 implementation don't try to resynchronize anything and verbosely fail
805 when something goes wrong, requiring manual modification of files to
806 fix the problem.
807 Even with these precautions, things can go wrong very easily here.
809 That's why all translations guessed this way are marked fuzzy to make
810 sure that the translator reviews and checks them.
811 Addendum: How does it work?
813 Well, that's pretty easy here. The translated document is not written
814 directly to disk, but kept in memory until all the addenda are applied.
815 The algorithms involved here are rather straightforward. We look for a
816 line matching the position regexp, and insert the addendum before it if
817 we're in mode=before. If not, we search for the next line matching the
818 boundary and insert the addendum after this line if it's an endboundary
819 or before this line if it's a beginboundary.
820
822 This chapter groups the Frequently Asked Questions. In fact, most of
823 the questions for now could be formulated that way: "Why is it designed
824 this way, and not that one?" If you think po4a isn't the right answer
825 to documentation translation, you should consider reading this section.
826 If it does not answer your question, please contact us on the
827 <po4a-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org> mailing list. We love feedback.
828 Why to translate each paragraph separately?
830 Yes, in po4a, each paragraph is translated separately (in fact, each
831 module decides this, but all existing modules do so, and yours should
832 also). There are two main advantages to this approach:
833 · When the technical parts of the document are hidden from the scene,
835 the translator can't mess with them. The fewer markers we present to
836 the translator the less error he can do.
837 · Cutting the document helps in isolating the changes to the original
839 document. When the original is modified, finding what parts of the
840 translation need to be updated is eased by this process.
841 Even with these advantages, some people don't like the idea of
843 translating each paragraph separately. Here are some of the answers I
844 can give to their fear:
845 · This approach proved successfully in the KDE project and allows
847 people there to produce the biggest corpus of translated and up to
848 date documentation I know.
849 · The translators can still use the context to translate, since the
851 strings in the PO file are in the same order than in the original
852 document. Translating sequentially is thus rather comparable whether
853 you use po4a or not. And in any case, the best way to get the
854 context remains to convert the document to a printable format since
855 the text formatting ones are not really readable, IMHO.
856 · This approach is the one used by professional translators. I agree,
858 that they have somewhat different goals than open-source translators.
859 The maintenance is for example often less critical to them since the
860 content changes rarely.
861 Why not to split on sentence level (or smaller)?
863 Professional translator tools sometimes split the document at the
864 sentence level in order to maximize the reusability of previous
865 translations and speed up their process. The problem is that the same
866 sentence may have several translations, depending on the context.
867 Paragraphs are by definition longer than sentences. It will hopefully
869 ensure that having the same paragraph in two documents will have the
870 same meaning (and translation), regardless of the context in each case.
871 Splitting on smaller parts than the sentence would be very bad. It
873 would be a bit long to explain why here, but interested reader can
874 refer to the Locale::Maketext::TPJ13(3pm) man page (which comes with
875 the Perl documentation), for example. To make short, each language has
876 its specific syntactic rules, and there is no way to build sentences by
877 aggregating parts of sentences working for all existing languages (or
878 even for the 5 of the 10 most spoken ones, or even less).
879 Why not put the original as comment along with translation (or other way
881 around)?
882 At the first glance, gettext doesn't seem to be adapted to all kind of
883 translations. For example, it didn't seemed adapted to debconf, the
884 interface all Debian packages use for their interaction with the user
885 during installation. In that case, the texts to translate were pretty
886 short (a dozen lines for each package), and it was difficult to put the
887 translation in a specialized file since it has to be available before
888 the package installation.
889 That's why the debconf developer decided to implement another solution,
891 where translations are placed in the same file than the original. This
892 is rather appealing. One would even want to do this for XML, for
893 example. It would look like that:
894 <section>
896 <title lang="en">My title</title>
897 <title lang="fr">Mon titre</title>
898 <para>
900 <text lang="en">My text.</text>
901 <text lang="fr">Mon texte.</text>
902 </para>
903 </section>
904 But it was so problematic that a PO-based approach is now used. Only
906 the original can be edited in the file, and the translations must take
907 place in PO files extracted from the master template (and placed back
908 at package compilation time). The old system was deprecated because of
909 several issues:
910 · maintenance problems
912 If several translators provide a patch at the same time, it gets
914 hard to merge them together.
915 How will you detect changes to the original, which need to be
917 applied to the translations? In order to use diff, you have to note
918 which version of the original you translated. I.e., you need a PO
919 file in your file ;)
920 · encoding problems
922 This solution is viable when only European languages are involved,
924 but the introduction of Korean, Russian and/or Arab really
925 complicate the picture. UTF could be a solution, but there are
926 still some problems with it.
927 Moreover, such problems are hard to detect (i.e., only Korean
929 readers will detect that the encoding of Korean is broken [because
930 of the Russian translator])
931 gettext solves all those problems together.
933 But gettext wasn't designed for that use!
935 That's true, but until now nobody came with a better solution. The only
936 known alternative is manual translation, with all the maintenance
937 issues.
938 What about the other translation tools for documentation using gettext?
940 As far as I know, there are only two of them:
941 poxml
943 This is the tool developed by KDE people to handle DocBook XML.
944 AFAIK, it was the first program to extract strings to translate
945 from documentation to PO files, and inject them back after
946 translation.
947 It can only handle XML, and only a particular DTD. I'm quite
949 unhappy with the handling of lists, which end in one big msgid.
950 When the list become big, the chunk becomes harder to shallow.
951 po-debiandoc
953 This program done by Denis Barbier is a sort of precursor of the
954 po4a SGML module, which more or less deprecates it. As the name
955 says, it handles only the DebianDoc DTD, which is more or less a
956 deprecated DTD.
957 The main advantages of po4a over them are the ease of extra content
959 addition (which is even worse there) and the ability to achieve
960 gettextization.
961 Educating developers about translation
963 When you try to translate documentation or programs, you face three
964 kinds of problems; linguistics (not everybody speaks two languages),
965 technical (that's why po4a exists) and relational/human. Not all
966 developers understand the necessity of translating stuff. Even when
967 good willed, they may ignore how to ease the work of translators. To
968 help with that, po4a comes with lot of documentation which can be
969 referred to.
970 Another important point is that each translated file begins with a
972 short comment indicating what the file is, how to use it. This should
973 help the poor developers flooded with tons of files in different
974 languages they hardly speak, and help them dealing correctly with it.
975 In the po4a project, translated documents are not source files anymore.
977 Since SGML files are habitually source files, it's an easy mistake.
978 That's why all files present this header:
979 | *****************************************************
981 | * GENERATED FILE, DO NOT EDIT *
982 | * THIS IS NO SOURCE FILE, BUT RESULT OF COMPILATION *
983 | *****************************************************
984 |
985 | This file was generated by po4a-translate(1). Do not store it (in VCS,
986 | for example), but store the PO file used as source file by po4a-translate.
987 |
988 | In fact, consider this as a binary, and the PO file as a regular source file:
989 | If the PO gets lost, keeping this translation up-to-date will be harder ;)
990 Likewise, gettext's regular PO files only need to be copied to the po/
992 directory. But this is not the case of the ones manipulated by po4a.
993 The major risk here is that a developer erases the existing translation
994 of his program with the translation of his documentation. (Both of them
995 can't be stored in the same PO file, because the program needs to
996 install its translation as an mo file while the documentation only uses
997 its translation at compile time). That's why the PO files produced by
998 the po-debiandoc module contain the following header:
999 #
1001 # ADVISES TO DEVELOPERS:
1002 # - you do not need to manually edit POT or PO files.
1003 # - this file contains the translation of your debconf templates.
1004 # Do not replace the translation of your program with this !!
1005 # (or your translators will get very upset)
1006 #
1007 # ADVISES TO TRANSLATORS:
1008 # If you are not familiar with the PO format, gettext documentation
1009 # is worth reading, especially sections dedicated to this format.
1010 # For example, run:
1011 # info -n '(gettext)PO Files'
1012 # info -n '(gettext)Header Entry'
1013 #
1014 # Some information specific to po-debconf are available at
1015 # /usr/share/doc/po-debconf/README-trans
1016 # or http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po-debconf/README-trans
1017 #
1018 SUMMARY of the advantages of the gettext based approach
1020 · The translations are not stored along with the original, which makes
1021 it possible to detect if translations become out of date.
1022 · The translations are stored in separate files from each other, which
1024 prevents translators of different languages from interfering, both
1025 when submitting their patch and at the file encoding level.
1026 · It is based internally on gettext (but po4a offers a very simple
1028 interface so that you don't need to understand the internals to use
1029 it). That way, we don't have to re-implement the wheel, and because
1030 of their wide use, we can think that these tools are more or less bug
1031 free.
1032 · Nothing changed for the end-user (beside the fact translations will
1034 hopefully be better maintained). The resulting documentation file
1035 distributed is exactly the same.
1036 · No need for translators to learn a new file syntax and their favorite
1038 PO file editor (like Emacs' PO mode, Lokalize or Gtranslator) will
1039 work just fine.
1040 · gettext offers a simple way to get statistics about what is done,
1042 what should be reviewed and updated, and what is still to do. Some
1043 example can be found at those addresses:
1044 - http://kv-53.narod.ru/kaider1.png
1046 - http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/
1047 But everything isn't green, and this approach also has some
1049 disadvantages we have to deal with.
1050 · Addenda are... strange at the first glance.
1052 · You can't adapt the translated text to your preferences, like
1054 splitting a paragraph here, and joining two other ones there. But in
1055 some sense, if there is an issue with the original, it should be
1056 reported as a bug anyway.
1057 · Even with an easy interface, it remains a new tool people have to
1059 learn.
1060 One of my dreams would be to integrate somehow po4a to Gtranslator or
1062 Lokalize. When an SGML file is opened, the strings are automatically
1063 extracted. When it's saved a translated SGML file can be written to
1064 disk. If we manage to do an MS Word (TM) module (or at least RTF)
1065 professional translators may even use it.
1066
1068 Denis Barbier <barbier,linuxfr.org>
1069 Martin Quinson (mquinson#debian.org)
1070Po4a Tools 2014-06-10 PO4A(7)
