Linguistic Team International Forum

Renamed.

Gnu asked about it in the shoutbox, so that is where I replied to him. Below is what I wrote there and there will be a loud announcement as soon as the work is completed.

"TZM Defined" contains a significant number of changes from the original essay releases collectively known as "Orientation Guide 2012" within Pootle. The new version is currently being prepped for Pootle, with an additional focus on working out the best way to update the existing project without destroying any of the translation work that has already been put into it.

Here is the situation:

The chapters were added to Pootle as they came out one by one. Back then, all the footnotes for a given chapter were at the end of the chapter. Now came out the new version that has gone through proofreading. There is something very different in the new version, structurally speaking - all of the footnotes are at the end of all chapters (see here). This is a big, nasty problem - not sure how to solve it yet. One possibility is to entirely recreate the project in Pootle.

Another factor is the proofreading - how much has actually changed? It wasn't easy to create, but here is a partial diff of the first two chapters - Diff Checker - Online diff tool that compares text to find the difference between two text files . As you can see, there are a lot of stuff changed here and there, mostly stylistically. This means that updating the current project in Pootle by making those word changed one by one is not really a viable solution.

Additionally, the text in the website ( TZM - Orientation ) does not have italics. They probably got lost somewhere in the conversion. But in the PDF there is quite a lot of use of italics. We noticed this previously and manually added all italics into the project before bringing it into Pootle (with a great deal of help from Jorge with this part). If we choose to recreate the project in Pootle, those italics would need to be manually added again, together with the italics for all the rest of the chapters.

And finally, I could see that there are still typos in the new version. Probably this is not that much of an issue, unless there are quite a lot of them, which would imply bigger updating of the project in Pootle, as they are being fixed through time. Unfortunately, when updates are done, sometimes Pootle loses the translation of the changed paragraph/string, and it has to be manually readded later.

That's about it as far as facts go. Hope it is understandable - if not, let me know and I'll try to clarify.

I don't know if all of this seems overwhelming to someone reading it. For the Pootle administrator it is pretty much normal stuff, hidden behind the neat-looking projects in Pootle. Besides being a lot of work, it is also fun to solve these kinds of problems. Only if one had more time...

Solving the above problems implies, at least in part, technical skills, and in part it implies community input on how to approach this and what kind of manual work is acceptable. Maybe there are solutions out there that could save a lot of manual work, but we (the Pootle admins - Ray and myself) are unaware of them. We got all the things we know the hard way - by reading and experimenting. And we started acquiring technical skills in order to be more helpful. We didn't have them prior to being Pootle admins. So if someone out there wishes to get in touch with us and help with these aspects, you certainly can - no matter if you do or don't have technical skills. All it takes is desire to learn.

Beautiful description, Bo!

Given all that is involved with even attempting to update a project with this percentage of changes, plus the need to get this beastie opened up for everyone to play with, I lean heavily toward the idea of creating it in Pootle as a new project, allowing any language that already has some of it translated to compare strings and make adjustments as they pull their work out of the old one for pasting into the new project, while also allowing those languages that haven't started the old one to jump right in sooner than later. PJ's promotion of this as the highest priority item within all of TZM's materials makes it important that this new version be available for translation as soon as possible, without anyone burning themselves out to make that happen.

Christos, you can see the changes yourself from the link I posted above. Here it is again: Diff Checker - Online diff tool that compares text to find the difference between two text files

Of course, it is only a very small part of the full text. We don't know how much the meaning has changed throughout the other chapters. But it seems that even stylistic changes can often be important.

About the footnotes: it isn't a problem if we entirely recreate the project. But it's a problem if we want to update it, because right now the footnotes are after each chapter. They can't be just moved after all chapters. It's a significant structural difference.

I was thinking, Ray, if PJ might be able to provide us with an HTML of the same structure as before - footnotes after each chapter. This would significantly help us on many fronts - comparing both versions, testing how well an update of the project will work, etc. If he was able to extract an HTML with footnotes after each chapter before, why wouldn't he be able to do it now? It's an automatic process anyways, so probably no work is involved. Can you ask him about this?

I did mention earlier, but without much detail because I didn't want to pollute the main topic at the time, that my attempts at breaking up the project into separate chapters (or even essays) also separated the references (they show up only where they are being called).
So, that takes dealing with this particular 'structural' issue out of the equation. Just let me know where you want the separations to be made.

I want all the references of a given chapter to show right after the end of that chapter. Just like they are in Pootle right now: Translate | TZM Defined | Afrikaans | Linguistic Team International Pootle Project

If you can do it for one chapter for testing purposes, that would be cool. I'll play with it and see what happens.

The trick for this is to Copy each individual section out of the original ODT and directly into its own ODT file, followed by a "Save As" of that ODT file into HTML. OpenOffice automatically generates the references within the file to which they belong.

As an added bonus, all italics are also preserved, so it negates the need to manually add them into the html later.
Unfortunately, it also brings along some unnecessary html tags, but I've worked out a relatively simple approach to replace the majority of them with a very simple <style> section in the header that Pootle should completely ignore during ingestion of the html files. The test you're aiming to run will tell us if reality comes close to my expectations.

Hit me up when you're ready and I'll pass you the resulting master "Preface" HTML file through Skype so you can play with it in Pootle.