Posted by ciampix on Apr 27, 2016; 6:35am
URL: https://discuss.asciidoctor.org/Professional-providers-translating-Asciidoc-tp2692p4652.html

Sorry I have seen this just now (I still prefer using the mailing list).

My current recommendation is to handle translations using DocBook.

You have a tool that produce wonderfully well pdf avoiding messing with DocBook (asciidoctor-pdf) and suggest to use it for translations? Why?

Most teams I know of using AsciiDoc do it this way.

Example of not using docbook for translation of asciidoc docs: KiCad

http://kicad-pcb.org/
http://kicad-pcb.org/help/documentation/
https://github.com/kicad/kicad-doc

just a little but powerful command: po4a
Then you can use all the tools you prefer (there are many) to translate the generated po files.

Honestly, I don't really see why it would be a big deal to translate AsciiDoc if you can find a group that does it for Markdown (or even if they don't do Markdown). The process will be very similar. It's just plain text.

You probably do not see this as a big problem since you consider translation as a single task, but, especially with software, translation is like developing: it is a constantly running job. You have to update translation while docs are written and modified. You really do not want to re-read constantly all the text to figure out what have changed and how for every language. You want something that extract automatically untranslated/changed strings for translation. You want gettext support. In this po4a comes in just as the perfect tool.

Regards