Dear colleagues,
I would like to know if you think it would be possible to use the available
online translation tools to coordinate the translation of Project Aon XML
files. Can you please read the reasoning below and share with me your
opinions on this?
The Spanish group has succesfully translated already books #1 to #16 (-#15)
but the process is manual, leads to errors that needs to be fixed manually
(people are not used to editing the XML files), inconsistencies in
translations (there is no translation glossary) and poses some challenges
when the English version is updated with errata, requiring manual tracking
through SVN of changes to move them over to the translation.
Using an online translation tool has the following benefits:
- Volunteers can contribute easily (only a web browser and minimal
knowledge is required), it opens up the translation to potentially many
more volunteers
- Provides tools to track changes from originals
- Makes it possible to keep glossaries and "translation memories" to
ensure consistencies across translations
However, I am not certain if using an existing service would be in
violation of the Project Aon license, as we would be putting up the books'
content in separate servers, not managed by the project.
If you do not know the tools and are interested in checking them out,
these are some translation sites (based on Free software) available:
- Pootle: http://translate.sugarlabs.org/
- Zanata, http://zanata.org/
- Translatewiki.net <http://translatewiki.net/>
- weblate.org
These sites are run as a service, some are free and some have a
subscription. The last one (Weblate) is maintained by a fellow Debian
Developer (Michal Cihar), and offers a free setup for open source projects.
I believe I could contact him to get a project setup for Project Aon that
we could use.
Alternatively, we could setup our own translation server based on free
software (e.g. Pootle). But then the administrative burden of maintaining
the server, users, etc. would have to be managed by the Project.
If we go to the approach of online tools, we would need to transform our
XML files into a format suitable for translation tools (e.g. PO files or
any other format supported by them [1]) and back from these files to XML.
I can investigate what options are out there [2]
Looking forward to your comments on this topic.
Saludos
Javier
[1] See for example
http://docs.translatehouse.org/projects/translate-toolkit/en/latest/formats/index.html
[2] Maybe adapting tools avilable for other XML DTDs formats such as
https://manpages.debian.org/jessie/poxml/xml2pot.1.en.html
