Re: PostgreSQL website translations

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 4:06 PM, Guillaume Lelarge
<guillaume@lelarge.info> wrote:
> Adrian Maier a écrit :
>
>
> > On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 2:06 PM, Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> wrote:
>  >> Adrian Maier wrote:
>  >>  > Perhaps we could something like  :  every translated contains
>  >>  > a comment with the  date+time+revision  of the corresponding
>  >>  > English page ?    at least this would make it possible to
>  >>  > manually manage the corresponding English revision for a given
>  >>  > translated page.
>  >>
>  >>  Perhaps we could use a custom svn property for that? That would likely
>  >>  make it easier to process automatically to pull out differences and
>  >>  such. And perhaps some wrapper scripts around svn to help you set
>  >>  things automatically?
>  >
>  > I haven't used such custom properties.  As long as such a property can
>  > be set for individual files ,  it seems to be a better (more reliable) solution
>  > compared to relying on comments.   Some scripts for using this facility
>  > would be a significant progress .
>  >
>
>  There's something I don't quite understand. What's the interest in
>  having these comments (or custom svn properties) ?
>
>  Tell me if I'm wrong. This is what we want to achieve :
>    we want to know if a specific translated webpage is out of date
>
>  Problem is :
>    * translator checks out a file
>    * during the translation, someone else checks out the file
>    * and commit its changes
>    * then translator commits its new translation
>
>  Using the modification date doesn't help us because the translation file
>  will be newer than the english one.
>  Using the svn revision does not help us because the translation file
>  will have a revision newer than the english one.
>
>  So, your idea seems to put the revision of the english file in a comment
>  or in a custom property. So, it's a manual change :
>
>   * translator checks out a file
>   * he updates the comment of the translation with the revision of the
>     english file
>   * he translates
>   * he commits
>
>  Is that right ?
>
>  And when the web server needs to choose between the english file and the
>  translated one, it parses the translated one to get the revision put in
>  comments, it gets the current revision of the english files and it
>  finally compares them ?
>
>  Could work, but we still rely on the translator good will. No automatic
>  process here. Or am I wrong ?

Actually , there are two different purposes :
1)  detecting which translated pages went out-of-date
2)  providing some reliable tools that help the translators to easily spot
the (English) modifications that they need to incorporate into their
translated texts.

I am primarily interested in (2) , because plain cvs/svn  is not helpful
enough when translating .

As for (1) : it will never be possible to automatically ensure that a
translation is truly up-to-date .  We'll need to trust the translators when
they claim they've updated some page .  Especially when you don't
understand their language ...



--
Adrian Maier