Booktype and Transifex

Published on January 24, 2014.

This week I worked in the portuguese translation of Open Education Handbook. In this post I cover the problem that we have using Booktype and Transifex for the translation.

Every book in Booktype can be export as a zip archive following the steps in Booktype manual. The problem that we have is related on how Booktype named the chapter files in the zip archive.

Steps to reproduce the problem

Create a book in Booktype.

{width=“100%”}

Add the first chapter.

{width=“100%”}

Export the book:

$ wget http://booktype.okfn.org/export/test/export/ -O test1.zip

Create the second chapter.

{width=“100%”}

Move (you can do it dragging and dropping the one of the chapter) the second chapter to be the first.

{width=“100%”}

Export the book:

$ wget http://booktype.okfn.org/export/test/export/ -O test2.zip

The problem

Now you should have two files: test1.zip and test2.zip. Let’s check what we have in both files:

$ unzip -l test1.zip 
Archive:  test1.zip
  Length      Date    Time    Name
---------  ---------- -----   ----
       23  1980-01-01 00:00   mimetype
       48  1980-01-01 00:00   ch000_first-chapter.html
     1095  1980-01-01 00:00   info.json
---------                     -------
     1166                     3 files
$ unzip -l test2.zip 
Archive:  test2.zip
  Length      Date    Time    Name
---------  ---------- -----   ----
       23  1980-01-01 00:00   mimetype
       49  1980-01-01 00:00   ch000_second-chapter.html
       48  1980-01-01 00:00   ch001_first-chapter.html
     1450  1980-01-01 00:00   info.json
---------                     -------
     1570                     4 files

As you can see inside test1.zip we have ch000_first-chapter.html and in test2.zip we have ch001_first-chapter.html but the content of this HTML files are the same as you check below:

$ unzip test1.zip ch000_first-chapter.html
Archive:  test1.zip
  inflating: ch000_first-chapter.html  
$ unzip test2.zip ch001_first-chapter.html
Archive:  test2.zip
  inflating: ch001_first-chapter.html  
$ diff ch000_first-chapter.html ch001_first-chapter.html

The problem is that for continuous translation/localization (if you don’t know what this means read this article at LingoHub’s blogs) with Transifex (look at the script that we use in GitHub) we can’t change the name of the file otherwise we will need to translate the file again.

Solutions?

I can thought in three ways to solve this problem:

code some scripts to discover what files had it’s name change and “fix” it;
change how Booktype store the book and export it;
use another set of tools if you plan continous translation/localization (maybe using MediaWiki based on¹ and²).

References

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