No, it apparently gives an error and exits. So the PO files have to be in sync with the source XML files when you generate the translated XML files. The translator will have to merge the updated source to the existing translations every time he does “svn update”. That will usually invalidate some translations (make them fuzzy), and they have to be corrected, but that’s how it goes. I’ll have to make some scripts (add to the book Makefile) for doing POT file generation and merging easily.
An alternative would be to keep a copy of the book XML files from which the POT files were generated, and update those less often, that is, not every time I commit changes to the book. This might stabilize the translation process greatly. Well, we can either do this in the project’s SVN repository OR the translation can do it himself. Or he can just not do “svn update” so often.
Hmm, maybe I should document the merge-translate-compile process a bit once I get the (probably quite easy) scripts working.