translation infrastructure in need

Hi everybody,
I have been a Free Software translator (into my native language,
Italian) for more than 20 years now. Why am I saying this? Do I feel
like brag myself? No. I am saying this because I am a little frustrated.

The thing is this. When I started translating the GIMP manual, more than
20 years ago, it was already evident at that time that an infrastructure
was needed that would facilitate the constant work of translators,
without hindering the work of authors.

That infrastructure was based on the gettext GNU utility and its base
file format: .po(t).

I am currently updating the Italian translations and I am really pissed
by the fact that I have to look into the git history to see what changed
in a file to be sure what I have to update.

I am speaking my mind out because ... well I know that I am not a
programmer and one should not ask others to do what one is not able to
do by himself but... I REALLY would like to do my translator job on .po
files instead of on .xml/.tek/.xhtml/.whatever code files

FSFE programmers, please, extract .po files from the sources and give
the translators a translators' job only! I would really appreciate that!
Do not ask translators to have programmers skills to do a translators'
job!

The GIMP manual, which is more than 1000 pages of docbook-xml code, is
translated into multiple languages using a small specialized utility
created at that time for that purpouse: xml2po

Nowadays there are more powerful tools like po4a (i.e. po for all)
that are able to do that for you, see:
https://www.po4a.org (unfortunately down at the moment...)
https://github.com/mquinson/po4a

With po4a one can automatically extract the text from almost any source
code and merge its translation back into the source. Most importantly it
will handle UPDATES automatically! That would enable translation tools
like emacs, ktranslator, poedit, etc. or web translation platforms like
Weblate (what BTW is already used for the translation of other FSFE
projects...)

If you prefer I can create a Bug Report based on this my rant...

-- 

Amike,
Marco Ciampa
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