Subject: Re: Considerations on a Multi-Lingual Site

From: Michael Glaesemann <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2003 02:35:02 +0900

On Tuesday, November 11, 2003, at 05:31 PM, Andreas Grabmüller wrote:
>> This doesn't solve the problem of how you get the list into the
>> database, but that shouldn't be too hard.
>
> Well, the problem I see is that we need a way for the translators to 
> write the list without knowing HTML...

After thinking about it a little more, I realized this is what you were 
talking about—not marking up stuff from the database, getting stuff 
INTO the database.

If a requirement is that the translators don't need to know html, I 
guess I'd go for something similar to wiki markup. Pretty comprehensive 
for the needs of the articles. And CSS let's us keep all the 
presentation markup separate. Just vanilla tags within the proper 
sections lets us style them appropriately.

Ultimately, without having an editor do all the markup, some form of 
markup is going to have to be employed—either html, wiki, or something 
else. An advantage of html is that (obviously) there's no need for a 
special parser. An advantage of wiki is that it might give us a little 
more control over relative headlines. We can define, for example, 
===Title=== to be <h3> or <h2> or whatever. Of course the html can be 
parsed and the headlines renumbered relative to whatever baseline we 
want. Or just make things really simple, and let <h1> be the headline 
of every article, and define the style of h1 (and others) via CSS.

>> I could see a link with something like "Translate this item" if a
>> translation isn't available in the preferred language of the viewer.

> Difficult - except we want to give everyone access to the 
> translations, it does not make sense to offer this link to 
> non-translators...

Add a flag to translators' cookies that allows them to see the links? 
CSS does allow you to display:none some items, and you could do that 
via a simple JavaScript style switcher, but I don't know how secure 
that'd be, as the links would still be in markup. Might be better just 
to completely leave those links when building the page.

I'm just trying to think of an easy way for the translators to get to 
the articles, rather than have to go through some cms system.

> Currently it's handled so if there's no translation the english 
> version is used - this won't work any more if we don't have an english 
> version, so the question is if the user than gets a 404 - File not 
> found message or the content in a different language...
>
>> 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.
>
> Should be possible. Currently just the one prefered language is 
> stored, but I see no reason why we should not allow to store more 
> preferences...

And this would get around the "no translation available" problem. The 
article needs to be written in *some* language, and you'd get that if 
nothing else is available, or nothing is higher on your language 
preference list.

---

From: Justin Clift <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2003 01:47:18 +0800

Hi guys,

Are we really the first Open Source Software project to really need an 
easy-to-maintain-and-extend-and-be-multi-lingual site?

Would it be beneficial (all good ideas presented here aside) for us to 
contact other large projects that have gone before us (perhaps the KDE 
project and others?) and find out what they recommend?  Some of them may 
be on their 2nd or more iteration of having done this, whereas we'll 
kind of be on our first (not counting lessons learnt from the Advocacy 
site).

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

Michael Glaesemann wrote:

> talking about—not marking up stuff from the database, getting stuff INTO 
> the database.
> 
> want. Or just make things really simple, and let <h1> be the headline of 
> every article, and define the style of h1 (and others) via CSS.
> 
> CSS does allow you to display:none some items, and you could do that via 
> a simple JavaScript style switcher, but I don't know how secure that'd 
> be, as the links would still be in markup. Might be better just to 
> completely leave those links when building the page.
> 
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---

From: Michael Glaesemann <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2003 02:54:47 +0900

On Wednesday, November 12, 2003, at 02:47 AM, Justin Clift wrote:
> project and others?) and find out what they recommend?

Where's the fun in that? :)

Sounds like a good idea. Definitely can't hurt to ask. Anyone know 
people in these groups? I'd be willing to cold-call, but if someone 
knows someone, might get a more efficient response.

Michael

---

From: Michael Glaesemann <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2003 02:57:07 +0900

Michael

---

From: Josh Berkus <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 10:14:23 -0800

Guys,

> > project and others?) and find out what they recommend?

Well, I can eliminate one:   OpenOffice.org is all done ad-hoc in raw HTML and 
is a disaster management-wise.   This is the reason why I'm so strident in 
pushing for something more structured, and in reiterating that "CVS is NOT a 
content management system."   I've a huge negative example in my past ....

-- 
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco

---

From: Justin Clift <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2003 02:58:52 +0800

> knows someone, might get a more efficient response.

Ok, two potential leads spring to mind immediately... Jono Bacon of the 
KDE <[email-masked]> project may know who the best people in the 
KDE project to discuss this with, and Dave Shea <[email-masked]> is 
a web design professional that does stuff with the Mozilla project.

As far as I'm aware the Mozilla project doesn't (yet) have a good 
multi-lingual website infrastructure, but Dave Shea looks to have a wide 
range of knowledge and may be able to point us towards other projects 
that do.

Hope that's helpful.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

---

From: Euler Taveira de Oliveira <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 19:11:05 -0200

Hi Justin,

> a web design professional that does stuff with the Mozilla project.
I get some URLs about the internationalization of websites. Basically, it's about two projects: Debian e KDE.
http://www.debian.org/devel/website/translating
http://i18n.kde.org/
http://i18n.kde.org/translation-howto/

---

From: Josh Berkus <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 13:45:44 -0800

Euler,

> From last one, we could see how to deal the docs and how to proceed. As 
Alvaro said, the guys are using SGML docs and extract a PO file. I think this 
is not too hard to handle .po files. There are some GUIs that handle this 
easily. (Kbabel, ktranslator, gtranslator, etc).

I'm not clear on how the KDE solution would work in terms of keeping website 
translations updated.   It seems designed for monumental rip-through of a 
stable version of a project. It also requires KDE-based tools, which leaves 
out a *lot* of people.

The Debian solution seems much more thourough.   If we could find some GUI 
editor so that translation vols would not need to learn WML or HTML, this 
would be perfect.  Hmmm, and we'd need to figure out how to do this if not 
all translation vols are web CVS committers or if they're running on 
platforms where good CVS tools are not available (i.e. Win95).

-- 
-Josh Berkus
 Aglio Database Solutions
 San Francisco