3. The problems with PO

Problems with the PO format:

Little structure and information provided and very limited context information

      
      #: drgenius_main.cc:172
      #, c-format
      msgid ""
      "\n"
      "Miss a filename to evaluate in --evaluate\n"
      "\n"
      msgstr ""
      "\n"
      "Il manque un nom de fichier dans --evaluate\n"
      "\n"

The format is not always properly used. Let's compare these two examples of the present version of drgeo, 1.0.0: the headers of the French and the Spanish translations

      
      msgid ""
      msgstr ""
      "Project-Id-Version: drgeo 0.9.14\n"
      "Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n"
      "POT-Creation-Date: 2005-01-01 16:33+0100\n"
      "PO-Revision-Date: 2004-11-10 14:58+0100\n"
      "Last-Translator: Hilaire Fernandes <hilaire@ofset.org>\n"
      "Language-Team: GNOME French Team <gnomefr@traduc.org>\n"
      "MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
      "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
      "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"

      
      msgid ""
      msgstr ""
      "Project-Id-Version: es\n"
      "Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n"
      "POT-Creation-Date: 2005-01-01 16:33+0100\n"
      "PO-Revision-Date: 2005-01-01 15:45+0100\n"
      "Last-Translator: Adrian Soto <adrianmatematico@yahoo.com.mx>\n"
      "Language-Team: Spanish <traductores@es.gnome.org>\n"
      "MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
      "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
      "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
      "X-Generator: KBabel 1.3.1\n"
      "Plural-Forms:  nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1);\n"

The reason why the mistakes are possible is because the format is not sufficiently validated.

Quality control? External to the format.
No workflow support (it would be beneficial to have a “translation” phase, a “review” phase etc… PO does not have support for this in the file format, other than the simple “fuzzy” flag)
No abstraction of inline tags and codes (this is a big disadvantage for formats like XML Docbook)
What segmentation? How to align? (this task of segmentation is not trivial at all, but is not obvious now because program messages tend to be short)
Team cooperation? Through external tools (distribution lists…)
Compendia cannot be used by professional translators because their tools don't support the format.
Terminology, external to the format.
How to share translation memories?
The tools and format are not familiar for volunteers and professional translators.

	Conclusion?
All right, maybe PO technology is OK for User Interfaces, but (1) is it the tool we need to translate documentation and resources? (2) It is the moment to pay attention to a new character in the scene of free software: teachers, featuring little technical how-to but high cultural levels. Few teachers can be outstanding software developers, but many can be instrumental in the creation of resources and in translation. But can we expect teachers to learn the tools we have been using so far? And finally (3) can we forget the need for a deeper “cultural translation” of resources?

Conclusion?

All right, maybe PO technology is OK for User Interfaces, but (1) is it the tool we need to translate documentation and resources?

(2) It is the moment to pay attention to a new character in the scene of free software: teachers, featuring little technical how-to but high cultural levels. Few teachers can be outstanding software developers, but many can be instrumental in the creation of resources and in translation. But can we expect teachers to learn the tools we have been using so far?

And finally (3) can we forget the need for a deeper “cultural translation” of resources?


2. Drgeo, GUI translation the GNU way		4. How to share translation memories?