1.3 Major Advantages of GNUN

Here is a simple list of situations where we hope this suite would prove useful.

• Automatic rebuild of all translations when the original article changes. This is the most important feature, as it prevents accumulation of seriously outdated translations.
• Global update of the whole site. Apply the previous point to the web server templates (under server/ in the ‘www’ repository). A single change to such a file will affect literally all articles, translated or not.
• Urgent notices. Sometimes an “urgent” notice is added by the webmasters, which should appear on all pages. Typically this is about an event where urgent action is needed, although often it is only relevant to a single country or even a particular city. Such a notice will propagate to all pages, and translators may choose whether to translate it or not. For example, the Urdu translation team may conclude that there are only a few Urdu speakers in Massachusetts, to participate in an event that will happen in Boston, so translating the “urgent” notice may not be very “urgent” for Urdu. However, such notice will appear in all translated pages and people who usually read gnu.org pages in their native language will see it, so they can take action as necessary. When the notice is removed, often within a week or two, it will disappear without translators’ intervention, whether they translated it or not.
• HTML validation. As a preliminary step, GNUN validates the English pages before updating the POT files, and the regenerated translations before committing them. It often detects typos and other errors in the markup.
• Simplification of the translation process—lots of errors and typos come from the fact that translators basically have to duplicate the whole HTML markup of the original. The PO files eliminate most of the basic markup, which is where most of the validation errors come from.
• Markup consistency site-wide—it will be substantially easier to update the site to a future standard, because translations will naturally follow the changes in the original articles. This also means that translation teams do not have to go through the boring process of converting their articles to the new SSI-based layout; this will be done automatically.
• Easy updates by translators. Modified paragraphs, links, etc. will appear as “fuzzy” strings in the PO files, newly added ones will appear as “untranslated”, and deleted will appear as “obsolete”. It is substantially easier to update a PO file, where a keystroke takes you to the part that needs updating, whatever it may be.
• Reporting and statistics. Since the basis is standard PO files, which are the canonical source of the translations, it is easy to manipulate them and extract useful information.