GRASS manual translation

Ideas for a translation framework

(Extracted from Updating GRASS Documentation)

A true translation framework for translation of both interface and documentation would be structured like this:

• web interface based on pootle, to make contributions easy also for non-tech people (gettext, html, etc). For a working system, see https://transifex.net/projects/p/grass6/
• for documentation use po4a, that can be integrated with pootle.
• see also http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/ticket/846

Some ideas for get full manuals translated

• put description.html files in GRASS-SVN repository, in a directory, e.g. grass-manpages-locales, and in one subdir, one per language, e.g.grass-manpages-locales/it

• put a tool in a directory in the grass source; for test I have made a script, to building full manual pages in a local language, including description and headers; the translation of the headers is made by extracting mstr from grassmods_lang.po file

• for each language, someone builds the manuals (html and man pages) by using the tool, and compresses them in a tar.gz file

• put the files, e.g. grassdocs_lang.tar.gz, in the download section of GRASS

• the normal user doesn't need to recompile grass, just dowloads the package for his language and installs it

• package manteiners of distibutions can create packages to do that

my two cents Marcocurreli 17:31, 16 February 2012 (PST)