Smartling Help and some general comments about internationalization of the MongoDB documentation

[Ed Costello]

Help for the Smartling system is located at http://support.smartling.com/home

I am presently trying to work through an issue with the "gettext" formatted .pot files, many of the strings we expected to be marked as non-translatable (for example markup or mongoDB commands) are showing up as translatable strings.  If possible please ignore strings in .pot files until I resolve this problem.

We use a markup language and document processor called Sphinx for the MongoDB documentation.

Sphinx documentation can be found at: http://sphinx-doc.org/

Generally many strings contained within Sphinx/ReStructuredText markup will not need to be translated.

For example,  if you see a string like :program:`mongod` then that entire string should be left in English.

The general pattern is :sphinxconstruct:`sphinx reference`.  Some examples are:

:doc:`/core/sharding`

:ref:`sharding-commands`

There is one pattern which will include a string which may need to be translated but you will need to judge based on context.

This pattern is:  :sphinxconstruct:`Potential String to Translate <sphinx reference>`.  Several examples are:

:term:`replica sets <replica set>`

:ref:`installation tutorials <tutorials-installation>`

:option:`--replSet <mongod --replSet>`

The first two ("replica sets" and "installation tutorials") should be translated, but the third ("--replSet") should be left as is.  And the Sphinx constructs (:term:, :ref:, :option) should be left in English.

In addition to the standard Sphinx/RestructuredText directives we have created several for use specifically in documenting MongoDB.  The canonical list is in the file bin/mongodb_domain.py in our git repository, however we do not expect to add many in addition to the following directives we currently have:

dbcommand, operator, projection, program, setting, status, stats, data, method, collflag, readmode, error, macro, limit

aggregator, expression, group, pipeline

These words are safe to translate if they appear as separate words, without Sphinx markup.

For example, in "This is an expression of a program pipeline projection", all of the words are acceptable to translate.

But, in "This is an :expression:`program-pipeline` of :projection:`{ $project : {title:1,author:1}}`" you would want to leave :expression: and `program-pipeline` and :projection: untranslated.

As we get a better understanding of Smartling I hope to have it automatically mask the known keywords so that they do not appear as translatable phrases.

If you are translating the web pages (which is the current default set up) then you should not even see these constructs, however our goal is to use the gettext format files so that we can produce the translated documentation in other formats (epub/PDF/etc).

If you find that there are phrases or terms we are using in the documentation which are difficult to translate please let us know here or in JIRA (https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/DOCS).  

Thank you for your help with this project.

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-ed costello

Manager, Technical Writing

{“10gen” : “(the MongoDB company)”}

[Jorge Puente Sarrín]

Hi Ed,

What about names such as: GridFS, GitHub, 10gen?

Is it possible exclude for suggest translation from Smartling?

2012/12/10 Ed Costello <e...@10gen.com>

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Jorge Puente Sarrín.

[Ed Costello]

On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 4:31 PM, Jorge Puente Sarrín <puente...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Ed,

What about names such as: GridFS, GitHub, 10gen?

Is it possible exclude for suggest translation from Smartling?

Working on it…