The major revisions to the book are now mostly done for Vaadin 6, so now would be a good time to look into the book translations again.
I’ve been experimenting with the
GetLocalization
community translation platform. It has some nice features such as translation voting. While it works, there are problems with the process. The biggest problem at the moment is that if a file is partially translated, the missing translations are copied from English. This completely messes the bookkeeping of what is translated and what is not. When these files are uploaded to the service after merging changes, the “translations” are uploaded as well, which messes up the translation memory with those English-English “translations”. I hope they get the problem fixed. I don’t know if there are some other problems, but I’m a bit worried about how well the platform handles fuzzy translations. As far as I know, it simply ignores them, as they are a bit of a gettext speciality.
There are some alternative collaborative web translation platforms as well that could work better.
The simplest way to translate, that works already, is to pull the book from the repository and use some gettext translation tool to do the translations. The translation build is easiest to do in Linux as it requires the gettext and poxml tools. I suppose it is possible to install those in other platforms as well.
For example, if you are using (K)Ubuntu, install the “gettext” and “poxml” packages. Then you should be able to do:
$ git clone -b vaadin-6 http://dev.vaadin.com/git/documentation/book-of-vaadin.git
$ cd book-of-vaadin/build
$ ant localized-docs
This compiles the HTML version of the book for the fi_FI locale, which currently has some translations just for testing purposes. To translate another language, for example French, you’d need to put the translated .po’s to manual/translations/fr_FR/ and then do “ant localized-docs -Dlocale=fr_FR” … or something like that. You may need to hack the build file a bit.
The POT templates that you need to start translating are in manual/translations/pot in the repository. You only need to put the translated .po’s to the fr_FR directory, for the rest, the English version will be copied automatically.
The translation of images is an open issue. Most of the images are SVG/Inkscape files and it’s theoretically possible to extract the strings from them as well, but it could be tricky.
So, my question largely is, do you people want a web-based translation platform or is this method suitable? We can use different solutions for different languages and it probably isn’t too hard to move existing translations to some web platform if necessary.