kempelen
@marcelocripe To your workflow, I have a totally different idea, based on long discussion with Claude Code. This would work perfect with large changes in translation, and helps a lot in keeping your copy updated when the English text changes, but it’s not Transfiex based.
Surprise, it’s AsciiDoc based! 🙂 (Like the original FAQ source.)
It’s git based.
The idea is a 3-way merge, which is quite difficult to understand, but after a lot of practice, it’s a very powerful tool. The basic idea is that you would edit the TXT files, which are “adoc” format. (that’s a very simple format, for example a line starting with a dot is a FAQ question). I attach a screenshot of icewm page’s text in a Vim in a RoxTerm terminal.
Why this? Because examining differences in text files is very clean work, thus updating a largely changed file from an updated English file would work well. The 3 way merge is:
1. you have a source material (English FAQ)
2. you make your own version (Portuguese FAQ) (Is it correct to call your language just Portuguese?)
3. when English is changed, this process indicates what was changed
4. you update your copy. (this is similar to how Transifex works, just with difficult to understand tools like Meld program, and various git commands)
4.a.) Paragraphs added in English will simple appear as new text between the Portuguese paragraphs
4.b.) Paragraphs changed or deleted in English will appear as a conflict (you can examine what English editors changed, and adapt your copy)
4.c.) Paragraphs added in Portuguese are never affected
5. Repeat for point 3.
The key is the “merge commit” at after your updates, that tells Git: This Portuguese document MATCHES THAT English document entirely. Based on this, git can later help you with all the points listed above. If you don’t do a real merge commmit, you don’t create a “THIS is my translation of exactly THAT” and the whole idea won’t work. Imagine all words are different between the two files, Git can still follow the things listed at point “4”. (I did not test this, but Claude says so. I do use Merge daily, but not between two totally different files, like one English and one Hungarian.)
Listing all technical steps would be too overwhelming at first. I wrote it and it was 12 complicated steps with various Git commands, so I deleted it to not scare you away.
But as a quick try, maybe you could start with just getting the ADOC TXT files of the FAQ, install the necessary program and run it. Go to a directory where you can have work files for this.
This installs asciidoc program and make:
sudo apt install asciidoc-base make
This clones anticapitalista’s FAQ repo (this creates a faq-docs-antix directory)
git clone https://gitlab.com/antiX-Linux/faq-docs-antix.git
This creates (updates) the HTML files in “FAQ” directory using the ADOC TXT files in the “src” directory:
cd faq-docs-antix
cd src
make allIf you want to try translating a TXT file in the “src” directory and then build the FAQ again, please make a git branch, otherwise later everything would fall apart. Of course you’ll need to learn the “adoc” format later on.
git checkout -b faq-pt-br
(In theory you would commit your translations to this branch. Later update the “master” branch with English changes, and when you attempt to merge to your branch, it would alert about the things I listed at point 4 above.)
So far the process (in my head) is very complex, and unfortunately I don’t want to translate the FAQ this way, so I cannot fully test it. But if you want to read my discussion with Claude about this particular issue, please search for patch/diff/git here, and read from that point:
https://c64.rulez.org/~lion/antiX/antix-faq-program.txt
I can probably make some Hungarian tests later – but so far I didn’t translate anything. 🙂
And the real test of all of our methods would be: how can we update the translation after the English FAQ changes. My plans are fully focusing on this, while we don’t even have access to that yet. 🙂 😉
ps: I did not test the git based procedure yet. All theory! 🙂
- This reply was modified 4 months, 1 week ago by kempelen.
- This reply was modified 4 months, 1 week ago by kempelen.
