I think the idea of having po files for translating the manual is an
interesting idea - because it means that when Nicole updates the manual, not the whole manual will have to be retranslated, but only the changed parts of it. If we keep the image names the same for each language, we could also have "translated" screenshots for each language.
Git allows to see what has changed in the English manual between versions, but those changes are not reflected in the translated manuals.
If someone wants to do a 1:1 translation, using po files make a lot of sense and it would lower the barrier for translating the manuals.
Agreed. This is a fantastic idea. Generating a po file from Docbook (and vice versa) is easy, and for 1:1 translations would be a great help. I think it would be much better to merge the translated Docbook into the git repository prior to releases, the way we do with Koha, rather than asking the translation teams to rewrite the manual every time something is pushed to the English.
I wrote a while ago (26-3-2010) on the same topic to Chris Cormak (he was translation manager, I think) ... I've been working on the translation of the 3.2 manual from some time, not too much lately because we are finishing the migration of almost all of the libraries of our university (hope we will finish in a month), but we plan to complete the translation eventually. Thanks to Nicole, the manual is a living thing and she does a great job, but every time she makes a change or adds something we are out of sync, then we need to search were in the english version she has made a change, and do the translation. The question is: Is it possible to apply to the manual the same procedure we have with the koha code? I mean, some procedure to generate a PO file from the manual, translate it and then generate the corresponding translated manual. Every time the English manual changes, then the PO file will have new, changed or deprecated strings, easier to found using pootle or poedit. ... It would be wonderful if this could be implemented. Bernardo