Browsing English (Australia) translation

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5 Specific notes about modules

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This chapter presents the specificities of each module from the translator and original author's point of view. Read this to learn the syntax you will encounter when translating stuff in this module, or the rules you should follow in your original document to make translators' life easier.

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Actually, this section is not really part of this document. Instead, it is placed in each module's documentation. This helps ensuring that the information is up to date by keeping the documentation and the code together.

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6 Known bugs and feature requests

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Quite a few already :(

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Why should I use po4a? What it is good for?

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I like the idea of open-source software, making it possible for everybody to access to software and to their source code. But being French, I'm well aware that the licensing is not the only restriction to the openness of software: non-translated free software is useless for non-English speakers, and we still have some work to make it available to really everybody out there.

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The perception of this situation by the open-source actors did dramatically improve recently. We, as translators, won the first battle and convinced everybody of the translations' importance. But unfortunately, it was the easy part. Now, we have to do the job and actually translate all this stuff.

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Actually, open-source software themselves benefit of a rather decent level of translation, thanks to the wonderful gettext tool suite. It is able to extract the strings to translate from the program, present a uniform format to translators, and then use the result of their works at run time to display translated messages to the user.

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But the situation is rather different when it comes to documentation. Too often, the translated documentation is not visible enough (not distributed as a part of the program), only partial, or not up to date. This last situation is by far the worst possible one. Outdated translation can reveal worse than no translation at all to the users by describing old program behavior which are not in use anymore.