Re: [Texmacs-dev] TeXmacs server

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On Sat, Jun 03, 2006 at 06:00:29PM +0200, Henri Lesourd wrote:
> >On Fri, Jun 02, 2006 at 08:13:26AM -0500, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas 
> Instead of a general solution (which, as a matter
> of fact, amounts to be able to translate unconstrained
> natural language, and is thus rather irrealistic), the
> solution used by SGML people (e.g., for documentation
> in the industry) is to have an SGML DTD where all
> the parts of the documents are multilingual. For
> example :
> [[
> <DOCUMENT ID=DOC1>
> <TITLE>
>  <PARAGRAPH ID=PAR1>
>    <DATA LANG=EN>Hello</SENTENCE>
>    <DATA LANG=FR>Bonjour</SENTENCE>
>    <DATA LANG=DE>Guten tag</SENTENCE>
>  </PARAGRAPH>
> </TITLE>

Sure, this is also what Alvaro proposes. I also considered this option,
which is quite reasonable. However, it has the disadvantage that
modifications in the translations are seen by a CVS like tool
like new versions (except when inventing a really better CVS system).
In particular, the current approach by translators to translate
the directory tree with some delay and send a tarball back is not really
feasable. This would disappear with the TeXmacs server approach though.
Another disadavantage is that authors of the originals should be
aware of translation issues, so as to use markup in an appropriate way.

The "dictionary approach", which is currently used for menus,
messages, etc. does not have these disadvantages. However,
it is harder to deal with context in this way (although this is less
a problem for paragraph or sentence based translations than for menu
items and the like). Also, it requires additional care for the right
version of TeXmacs, etc.