[Sugar-devel] Open translation tools (was: Potential volunteer offering technical writing)

[samy boutayeb]

Hi Christoph,


> I briefly looked at OmegaT and Okapi: the first one looks quite
> interesting
> but I'm less sure what to do with the latter. So if you have a moment
> could
> you briefly lay out the workflow in which these different tools would
> be
> used within the context of a 1-day or multi-day translation sprint
> with a
> handful of participants?
> 

The idea behind those translation tools is to make the work of the human
translator easier, by automatizing tecnical tasks (such as converting,
transcoding files) which are (or should be) left outside of the scope of
a language specialist and by simplifying the dealing with formatting
rules of tagged or structured documents.

Rainbow may be used to create so called "Translation Kits" from a set of
original documents, which are converted and packaged according to the
conventions of the translation tool of choice:
* OmegaT: in this case, a "OmegaT Project" is created with all its files
and directory structure in place.
* Any PO editor: a simple package where translatable files are extracted
into PO files.

The Rainbow Translation Kits are fully configurable. For instance, you
can set up separately the language (say "en-us" for the source documents
and "de-at" or "es-uy" for the target documents) and encoding settings
(say "us-ascii" for the source documents and "utf-16" for the target
documents) of the source and target documents.

Then, the individual documents are assigned to a translator (and later,
to a reviewer), either online or offline.

After being translated & reviewed, the documents produced are
post-processed using the function "Translation Kit Post-Processing",
wich reverts back the formatting of the original documents and the
directory structure, while applying the locale and encoding settings as
set up previously.

To sum it up, the pre- and post-processing is where Rainbow may be
useful, whereas the translation and reviewing may be carried out with
the help of dedicated tools (say OmegaT, Poedit, Pottle, GTranslator,
etc.).
The list of available conversion filters provided by Rainbow (and more
generally by the OKAPI framework) contributes to broaden the use cases
of the usual localization tools, whose core formats are highly
specialized and suitable for translation related tasks (bilingual
documents used internally by those tools, as translation memories,
glossaries, bilingual alignments).


> Thanks,
> Christoph
> 
> -- 
> Christoph Derndorfer
> 
> editor, OLPC News [www.olpcnews.com]
> volunteer, OLPC (Austria) [www.olpc.at]
> 
> e-mail: christoph at derndorfer.eu