During the last year the Docs Project has made significant strides in working with the XML in our CVS repository. Our toolchain has improved along with our understanding of how to make better use of our XML content assets. We are making a change that will turn quite a number of translations "fuzzy" but the changes themselves will be quite minimal.

Some time ago, because of some toolchain deficiencies, we elected to use the "xml2po -e" option to parse entities when creating POT and PO files. So if our XML looked like this:

<para>This paragraph is about &FED;.</para>

The POT would use contain this msgid:

This paragraph is about Fedora.

We are moving now to a better XML handling infrastructure where the POT's msgid will instead look like this:

This paragraph is about &FED;.

These entity definitions, such as &FED; or &FCVER;, are defined in our docs-common/ module under docs-common/common/entities, and can be translated using normal POT/PO tools. By translating that content, you will allow these entities to be "filled in" after translation, and during the build process.

Previously, if an entity changed, the msgid's using that content would all change too. Now changes in the entities can be entirely independent of the content and if we change &FCVER; from "7" to "8," you will not need to update any content. (Entities with actual language content would need to be kept up-to-date, of course!)

So, while there will be some temporary minor inconvenience, in the long run this will improve the translation process and lighten your workload. Thank you to everyone who works so hard on the translations of Fedora content!