Maxima i18N and I10N, especially in French

2006/4/13, Robert Dodier <robert.dodier at gmail.com>:
> Hello Nicolas,
>
> About documentation in French, there is quite a bit at
> the web site of Michel Gosse, http://michel.gosse.free.fr/ ; see
> http://michel.gosse.free.fr/documentation/index.html .

I have already contacted Michel Gosse yesterday (no answer yet) to
coordinate with him if possible.

> However, the reference manual is from the year 2003
> and a lot has changed since then. The English version has
> changed enough that I think it would be easier to translate
> the current English version rather than attempting to update
> the existing French translation.

maybe in the absolute but I am not sure for my students ...

> > I would therefore appreciate to know what would be needed as work to
> > be done to achieve what I would like: is this "only" (I know it could
> > mean a lot of work) .po translation ? If yes, this would be great and
> > I would suggest to do it through the help of the Rosetta system in
> > http://launchpad.net and I could also participate, and have some
> > students help too.
>
> The reference manual is written in texinfo and the translations
> have been created by creating additional texinfo files.
> Reference manual look-up is carried out by regular expression
> searches on the processed texinfo (.info) files.
> This scheme is, I suspect, idiosyncratic to Maxima.
>
> I don't know much about .po files so if that could help in
> some way, please explain.

the .po files refer to the gettext system used by many free software
aplications at first but also documentation afterwards. This is a
system that allows to keep track easily of the documentation in the
different languages, and has already many tools to help with the
translation.

there is a tool  po4a po4all (http://po4a.alioth.debian.org/) that
allows to use the full set of tools it for documentation, even in tex
format.

The http://launchpad.net platform has been set up by the people of
Canonical (who make also Ubuntu) to help get easy translations from
anyone: no need to use special tools that have to be installed, just a
browser, and this allows to split the translation work within a team.

> If you and your students want to work on an updated
> French translation, that would be tremendous.

I do not promise I can have do enough work, nor me, but at least I
want to move forward.

> Perhaps you can coordinate with Michel Gosse.

I'll do asap

> Hope this helps, and let us know where you want to go from here.

Where can I have a look at the original English documentation and
maybe the corresponding Spanish one ? So that I can have a look and
see more how I could work with that.

Thanks,

Nicolas
> Robert Dodier
>


--
Nicolas Pettiaux - email: nicolas.pettiaux at ael.be