Translating Easily with Sphinx (Updating the Source Document)

When you write technical documentation, using sphinx is convenient. And if you are translating technical documentation, sphinx-intl is extremely useful. It has many advantages, but it also easily solves the problem that causes the most pain for technical documentation translators: the frequent changes to the source document. It pinpoints exactly which parts have changed and tells you. You just need to re-translate those parts!

Let’s get started.

This is based on translating into Korean. Of course, there is also a Korean translation of the official Sphinx documentation.

1. Update the changes to the document

   # Pull from the original repository of the document
   git pull master 
   

2. Update the translation files

   # Update (regenerate) the po file, which is Sphinx's translation file
   make gettext
   cd docs
   sphinx-intl update -p _build/locale -l ko
   

3. Check the updated parts
   • Compare carefully with git diff and organize the updated documents
   • Searching for #, fuzzy makes it easy to find the changed parts of the source text!
4. Check it in HTML

   # Render the page translated into the ko language as HTML
   make -e SPHINXOPTS="-D language='ko'" html 
   

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python! is being translated using the method above. It’s doomed