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.

Regards,

Jared