Publican and Docbook stylesheets

Ankitkumar Rameshchandra Patel ankit at redhat.com
Wed Jun 10 14:49:58 UTC 2009


Ruediger Landmann wrote:
> Hi all :)
>
> Fedora translators have done incredible work getting Publican's 
> "Common Content" sections into their languages. Due to your efforts, 
> Publican can now support 37 languages other than English [1]
>
> Publican also relies on word lists for various languages that are 
> produced by the Docbook project upstream of us [2]. These stylesheet 
> files provide around 150 common words like "chapter", "index", 
> "warning" -- mostly labels and headings that are not part of the text 
> itself. While stylesheets exist for nearly every language for which 
> Fedora documentation exists, there are a small number of exceptions. 
> No stylesheet exists yet for:
>
> * Assamese
> * Malay
> * Malayalam
> * Marathi
> * Sinhalese
> * Telugu
>
> Unfortunately, the nature of these stylesheets makes our usual 
> translation mechanism (through PO files) difficult, since these are 
> really only lists of isolated words, with no context whatsoever, and 
> these words are structured in a way that makes them appear as empty 
> strings in PO files! [3] Finally, development of these stylesheets 
> takes place upstream, and not in the Fedora project itself.
>
> With all this in mind, I've put together a spreadsheet of the words 
> that need translating, with some explanatory notes in English, and 
> uploaded it to my fedorapeople page here: 
> http://rlandmann.fedorapeople.org/locale.ods
>
> I already have volunteers to help with Malay. Is there anyone who can 
> help out with 150 words in any of the other five languages on the list 
> above?
>
> I hope to take any spreadsheets that I receive, transfer the results 
> into properly formatted stylesheets, and get these included into the 
> docbook project upstream.
>
> Please let me know if you'd like to help.
>
> Cheers
> Ruediger
>
> PS: if you want to see the stylesheets already in Fedora and their 
> contents, make sure you have the docbook-style-xsl package installed. 
> You will find the stylesheets in a directory named like 
> /usr/share/sgml/docbook/xsl-stylesheets-1.74.0/common (the number at 
> the end of xsl-stylesheets-1.74.0 will vary, depending on the version 
> of the package on your system)
>
> [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Publican/Common_Content -- does 
> your language have green ticks yet? :)
> [2] http://docbook.sourceforge.net/
> [3] for example, the entry for "Appendix" is "<gentext key="Appendix" 
> text="Appendix"/>". Note that the text is *inside* the tag, not 
> between tags.
>
Hi,

Couple of things before we go further.

* It's really important to translate these messages as Rudi described, 
since it does appear as common contents in the publican generated books.
* Finally, I managed to find the exact upstream location of the 
translation xml files: 
http://docbook.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docbook/trunk/gentext/locale/ :)
* For Indic languages there is no concept of Lower case or Capital, so 
translation remains same for both cases. Localizers will take care of it.
* I noticed for many of the existing translated languages, Month Names 
are still in English. Respective language communities might want to 
translate those.
* Managing the translations via openoffice file format looks difficult 
to me. I think it's better to get it converted to PO format. Conversion 
looks difficult now, but definitely not impossible. Someone with good 
Shell, Perl scripting knowledge would want to take this opportunity I guess.
* Once the conversion to PO becomes possible out of these xml files, it 
would be good if we (transif user) can have the access to upstream 
sf.net repo and the module added to Transifex.

Thanks!

-- 
Regards,
Ankit Patel
http://www.indianoss.org/




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