[Po4a-Devel] Re: english focus of po4a
On Mon, Mar 29, 2021 at 12:20:47PM +0200, Martin Quinson wrote:
Hello,
this is a common concern for the translation of libre resources. It
would be indeed better if English would not be such a central language in
our systems, for many reasons. Using esperanto as a pivot language
instead would indeed be a very pleasant change. But to be honnest, I
doubt to see that in my lifetime. There is too few esperanto speaker in
the world in general, and in libre communities in particular. We would
probably not have that many contributors to po4a if esperanto were a
prerequisite for that...
I would agree with you but ... let's "hope" like the word Esperanto
suggests... ;-)
Plus, actually, nothing in po4a nor in po forces to use english as a
pivot language. It's just the habit. And the message you are refering too
is some sort of a shortcut. The sentence is already complex enough that I
did not felt to make it worse by changing "English" to "original
language" here. If you have a better formulation that is both more
neutral and simpler, I'd be glad to integrate it.
Good to know since I knew that also gettext is not anymore "English centric".
I am not a English native speaker so my English is far from perfect.
Therefore I won't suggest a "better" rephrasing (as I am not able to do it
myself)
but perhaps you can pass on this little piece of information inserting just this:
"Let's say our original source reference (or pivot, your choice here) language is
English."
So it would be:
"The idea is to reuse and adapt the gettext approach to this field. As with "
"gettext, texts are extracted from their original locations and presented to "
"translators as PO translation catalogs. The translators can leverage the "
"classical gettext tools to monitor the work to do, collaborate and organize "
"as teams. po4a then injects the translations directly into the documentation "
"structure to produce translated source files that can be processed and "
"distributed just like the s/English/original source/ files.
"Let's say our original source reference language is English. "
"Any paragraph that is not "
"translated is left in English in the resulting document, ensuring that the "
"end users never see an outdated translation in the documentation."
Thanks for noticing,
you're welcome.
--
Saluton,
Marco Ciampa