Re: Some (little) problems about contributing to the translation of guix-manual

[Miguel Ángel Arruga Vivas]

Hi, Hubert!

Hubert Lombard <contact@hubert-lombard.website> writes:
> Hello guix!
>
> Trying to contribute to the French translation for guix-manual, I encounter 
> some problems.
>
> Everything I tried to translate was mostly done under Guix System with
> Gtranslator. A little bit with poedit too, but... when I go under
> debian (dual-boot), I find that translations done under Guix System
> are apparently not seen, for example :
>
> With Guix System : $ msgfmt -cv guix-manual-1.2.0-pre2.fr.po
>                    8471 messages traduits, 813 traductions approximatives, 
> 602 messages non traduits.
>
> With debian :      $ msgfmt -cv guix-manual-1.2.0-pre2.fr.po
>                    8459 messages traduits, 825 traductions approximatives, 
> 602 messages non traduits.
>
> Du coup, I don't know if the 12 translated messages and the 12
> approximate translations set have been taken into account or not. But
> I think not... From time to time, I have the impression to redo some
> translations/modifications.

This seems a bit unsettling, sure, but probably is just a matter of
paths, or unnoticed errors somewhere...

> The first time I tried poedit under Guix System, I thought I saw a
> stealthy message like "translation error" or something like that. The
> following times, this message didn't appear anymore.

Like this one.  I hope it's just the former and that was an unrelated
message.  :-(

> Could it be a localization problem? In order to test, I created
> /usr/share/locale/en/LC_MESSAGES which currently contains en_en.msg,
> messages.mo, my_file.po and test.mo (These files come from gtranslator
> and poedit, in which I have previously entered the path to
> /LC_MESSAGES.

You don't need these paths for the manual translation, it isn't even
translated at runtime.  :-)

Guix compilation is the process taking care of it.  To test it, with
Guix installed and on top the source code from Git, I do the following
(change 'es' for 'fr', and omit the steps marked as "!" when you have
already done them once):

  $ cp /path/to/my/working/es.po po/doc/guix-manual.es.po
  $ guix environment guix
! [env] $ ./bootstrap
! [env] $ ./configure --localstatedir=/var
! [env] $ make
  [env] $ make info && info -f doc/guix.es.info

You can cancel the "make" step as soon as you see a MAKEINFO line, it's
needed only to generate some additional files for the manual.

> Well, I think it's just a matter of time ;-)
[...]
> I'm a bit nervous, knowing that 1.2.0 is about to be released, I was
> wondering if I would have time to send my version before the
> deadline. I'm currently at over 86%.

It's normal feeling sometimes like that, more when it's the first
release you're involved---speaking from my own experience---, but you
also have to look it from the other side: ~90% means that a huge portion
of the manual text can be read by French speakers!  :-)

> If you have any comments, please let me know.

I don't know how perform poedit and gtranslator at this, but seeing the
actual .po (as with po-mode with emacs) eases a lot the cleanup of fuzzy
translations first, because you can spot the difference between the old
and new msgids---note to writers, please keep the paragraphs
short:)---and apply just that to the text when it's needed, as sometimes
the translation didn't have a typo at all.

> Wishing you a good evening,

I wish you have one too. :-)

Happy hacking!
Miguel