We have some problems with our translation workflow, and updating it could make life easier for everyone. Note that as an American, I barely speak English, so there may be misconceptions in the following. Please correct me if necessary.

* Translators work too hard.  No automation, no assistance from the
  computer to see what needs to be translated, no reuse of
  previously-translated terms.  Because of this, updating translations
  after the English version changes can take a long time.

* Few new translators are willing to work that hard, so we are missing
  up-to-date translations to several important world languages.

* Separating whitespace and content patches makes it more difficult for
  writers to edit existing English documents.

The current workflow, such as it is, is very, very old. Since it was created, new ways to translate have come about. PC-BSD is using Pootle (textproc/pootle, http://pootle.translatehouse.org/) for their documentation: http://pootle.pcbsd.org/

I think we can use a combination of tools to work with our existing documents. The workflow would be like this:

1. Use textproc/itstool to create a "strings to be translated" file
   (.pot) from an XML file.

2. Use pootle as a database to translate any of those strings that have
   not already been translated.

3. Use itstool to merge the translated strings back into the XML file.

4. Build the translated document (DocBook or XHTML) as normal.

The first difficulty I've found is that itstool does not like entities. It could be modified to accept them, but probably the more correct procedure for translations is to expand them before using itstool. This would be more correct for translations, as it's been explained to me, because some languages modify nouns depending on how they are used. (In other words, our use of entities can be English-centric.)

Is there an easy way to expand entities?
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