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Translating Manpages

Manpages, or manual pages, displayed in your terminal by the man program, are an important resource for computer users. They are distributed with the system, and they contain a great deal of immediately-accessible and specific information on how to use software.

man man will tell you all about the man program, but briefly: you type man <command> (e.g. man find) to view the manual page about that command or program. Use the spacebar to page down, and type q to quit (this clears the manpage completely and returns you to the point where you called that page).

Manpages have been translated, and distributed separately by language groups, or made available at certain sites. The aim of a small project liaising between GNU and The Translation Project is to integrate the translation process with the central manpage distribution process. Manpages will be translated, just like applications, then distributed with the original package, just like applications.

The manpage format, (g)roff or similar, is not easy to translate. However, the po4a conversion filters remove this problem completely, by giving us the capacity to convert manpages to our familiar PO format. (See more information on conversion filters you can use in Non-PO formats.)

Pootle has integrated po4a and the Translate Toolkit filters, which enabled me recently to upload a trial manpage to Pootle, have it automatically converted there to PO format, translate it easily, then have it converted back to g(roff). This simplified the translation process considerably.

Debian has just made a package of manpages available in PO format, again using po4a. This is a big step forward, and will result in many more, and more current, manpage translations.

I found, once I’d translated my pilot manpage (find1), that I had to do some configuration before my UTF-8 (Vietnamese) manpage would display correctly in my terminal.

Manpage process

NROFF /usr/bin/groff -Wall -mtty-char -Tascii -mandoc -c

and edit it to:

NROFF /usr/bin/groff-utf8 -Tutf8 -mandoc -R

Please add any information specific to your system or language. This information will help ensure an effective manpage translation and distribution process. :-)

Clytie

clytie [at] riverland [dot] net [dot] au