Subject: Considerations on a Multi-Lingual Site

From: Josh Berkus <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2003 10:28:26 -0800

Andreas, folks:

You may have already thought of this, but there's two issues that need to 
govern our support of multiple languages on www.postgresql.org:

1) It needs to be possible for translators to translate content without 
knowing HTML, XHTML, or CVS.   Right now, we have 17 volunteer translators, 
but if you limit translation to people who have HTML skills, that gets cut 
down to *three*.   And if you have the translators send you stuff for you to 
correct/markup, you will spend several/many hours per week doing this.
	The approach which Robert took with the Advocacy site isn't bad, except for 
the below issue and that translation elements need to be groupable for 
comprehensaibility.

2) It also needs to be possible for the non-English communities to contribute 
content in some form to their own site without having it first in English. 
I'm thinking of the German & Brazillian communities particularly.

-- 
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco

---

From: Josh Berkus <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2003 16:56:30 -0800

Andreas,

> It's difficult to create elements like lists without knowing HTML. I think 
we have two options here: a bbcode parser that allows some input like the 
popular bulletin boards do or using a WYSIWYG editor.

I vote for the bbcode parser, using bulletin-board or Wiki markup.

> If a translator creates a page in its own language, should it be not 
available to other languages or appear in that foreign language for the 
english people? 

Well, if it was possible for it to be available to the other languages for 
*translation*, I would say keen.

> Should they be able to change the menu (just for their own language or for 
all)?

I don't think that's necessary.

-- 
-Josh Berkus
 Aglio Database Solutions
 San Francisco

---

From: Michael Glaesemann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 10:16:06 +0900

On Tuesday, November 11, 2003, at 08:03 AM, Andreas Grabmüller wrote:
> It's difficult to create elements like lists without knowing HTML.

Couldn't it be done along the lines of building selects? Say you've got 
an array of list items:

$list_array = array ('apples','oranges','grapes');

$list_string =  '<ul>';
foreach $list_array as $this_item {
	$list_string .=  '<li>'.$this_item.'</li>';
}
$list_string .= '</ul>';

This doesn't solve the problem of how you get the list into the 
database, but that shouldn't be too hard.

>  I think we have two options here: a bbcode parser that allows some 
> input like the popular bulletin boards do or using a WYSIWYG editor

A bbcode parser would probably be adequate. Wiki markup isn't too hard 
and parsers are easy to come by.

> available to other languages or appear in that foreign language for 
> the english people? Should they be able to change the menu (just for 
> their own language or for all)?

I could see a link with something like "Translate this item" if a 
translation isn't available in the preferred language of the viewer. 
That then brings them to the bbcode page (requiring whatever 
authentication you want, if you want to limit the translations to be 
done only be authorized translators).

As for what news is displayed, I think it might be a good idea to 
display all of the items, with as many translated as translations are 
available. For languages that haven't got a full version of everything 
translated, you might get some pretty sparse pages, and people wouldn't 
necessarily know what they're missing.

It might be nice if you could store a language preference order in the 
cookie. So for example, if I wanted English first, then German, then 
Japanese, I'd get the translation of the highest preference that was 
available.

This may have already been hashed out. I haven't looked closely enough 
at that section of the code yet.

Michael

---

From: Michael Glaesemann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 10:20:16 +0900

$list_string =  '<ul>';

Michael