Since May 2010, gtkmm.org has been available in Chinese as well as English, thanks to a patch from Tao Wang. It uses DocBook XML and xml2po, like any other GNOME documentation, along with some custom DocBook XSL stylesheet parameters and our web site’s CSS.

It works. Translations can be kept up to date easily when the original English changes (though they haven’t so far in this case, admittedly) because the translations are not in copies of the documents, but in regular gettext .po files. It’s not a CMS, and editing is not particularly user-friendly, but it’s no worse than the untranslated HTML that we had previously.

I recently cleaned up the web site’s directory structure so it’s more like an application or documentation manual so you can see what I mean. And the gtkmm.org translation status is available on l10n.gnome.org thanks to Claude Paroz. The gtkmm book is also translated in the same way, so now everything other than our (Doxygen) API reference is translatable.

The build could be improved by someone who knew how. You currently need to add an HTML_generation block in the Makefile.am when you add a new locale.