C. Translating markup and related worries:
Whether or not an XML markup change affects translations shouldn't be
on our minds, but today it must be. Currently all changes, markup or
otherwise, affect the status of a translation. Ideas were explored to
help solve this symptom but nothing great came about.
The rev line can be changed to the original doc to specify the current status.
This way translation effort can be saved for changes that do not effect
the translation. For example:
<!-- $Revision: 1.1 $ Efficacy: no -->
I'm not sure exactly what you mean here, but I don't feel us relying on humans to decide if a change matters to translators or trust this would be done 100% of the time.
So we must change our process, but how? We have a few options:
1. Keep the current system, and simply change the revision handling
2. The same as (1) but with a few other tweaks
3. Totally rethink the system
I am in favor of (1)
Fair enough, although in this case we'd need some sort of magical tag for SVN or GIT that I'm not aware of at this time. Or some other means.
I'm in favor of (3) but personally don't know the topic well enough to
comfortably design it. My gut says move towards a gettext based system
with po/pot files but again it's not something I've used personally
but do know others have and like it, that other large manuals use it
with success, and that many tools exist to manage this including po
specific text editors. And because several projects already do this we
could evaluate several and decide what would work best for us. And, of
course steal their HOWTO information ;)
This would not work for po/pot files in the case of Turkish. Our
sentence structure is quite different from Latin languages. We would
have to changes the position of items within a sentence. For instance,
when examples are given within a sentence, we would change the position
of examples, and in some cases we would reduce or increase the number
paragraphs. In the case of doc translation, XML-PO file are not a
suitable choice for us. If you can let us, we can continue doc
translations using the current system.
Other projects using po have manuals translated to Turkish (and also RTL languages) so I'm assuming these sort of problems have been overcome. However, if not then that's a major concern but I have a feeling it'd be fine. And as far as having each translation determine the system it uses, I much prefer consistency throughout as it means we'd only work on (manage) one system and never have to change back and forth as teams of translators change.
Regards,
Philip