public inbox for [email protected]  

help / color / mirror / Atom feed

From: Alexey Borzov <[email protected]>
To: Dave Page <[email protected]>
Cc: Josh Berkus <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Cc: Tino Wildenhain <[email protected]>
Cc: Magnus Hagander <[email protected]>
Cc: Guillaume Lelarge <[email protected]>
Cc: Peter Eisentraut <[email protected]>
Cc: Adrian Maier <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Multi-language to be or not to be
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 17:03:02 +0300
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>

Hi,

Dave Page wrote:
>> The main problem as "I told you back then" is that a person willing to
>> contribute to the website has to jump through a lot of hoops. As you
>> probably noticed, potential translators who participated in this thread
>> had no clue about the possibility of website translation. To know about
>> that requires either searching the archives of pgsql-www or looking at
>> pgweb module on gborg (which is itself "deprecated" for quite a bit of
>> time).
> 
> Err, no it's not, though we don't tend to use the task manager any more.
> Or do you mean GBorg itself?

Yes, I meant GBorg itself, sorry for lack of clarity.

>> So to learn about translation infrastructure one essentially has to
>> already know about translation infrastructure.
> 
> There are 'translation people' who know about the infrastructure who
> still have chosen not to work on translating the website - I suspect
> that part of the issue is simply the size of the task rather than
> difficultly in doing the job - the po files are there for the dynamic
> stuff, the admin site for the stuff that comes and goes on a regular
> basis, and the vast majority of the static pages never change (which
> means there is not necessarily any need for gettext type tools to
> monitor the changes).

I do understand the task is quite big, but attracting more people to it will 
allow it to be split in more manageable chunks.

>> Well, even if you create a complete and standard infrastructure you'll
>> still need to translate at least
>> 1) Script messages and words from common templates. This can be done now
>> through complete and standard gettext.
>> 2) Content stored in database (news and such). There is an interface for
>> this now, though it may require polishing (no one can say for sure,
>> 'cause no one actually *used* that).
>>
>> The only real problem IMO is "static" pages containing a lot of text and
>> stored in CVS currently. It wasn't the brightest idea back then and they
>> probably belong in the database, alongside all other stuff.
> 
> That would make management easier, but I don't think it will make a huge
> difference to translatability of the site - whilst you could check a
> page on the admin site periodically to check for changes since the last
> translation update, it would probably be easier to just monitor the
> pgweb-commit list and update translations reactively.

That will make a difference, as we gain 2 types of content to translate rather 
than current 3. Also we can add customized notifications rather than make people 
monitor the whole commits list.

Of course that leads us to implementing a means to add new pages and sections to 
the website without having to manually add them to the navigation templates. 
Then we need to have a flexible access rights infrastructure that will allow 
translators to work on their stuff without the possibility that one day the 
front page of postgresql.org will be presented in a mix of Japanese, Russian and 
Turkish.


Also please note, I'm not trying to defend the current website architecture, it 
definitely isn't the best one: my goal back then was to get the site out ASAP 
and reuse as much previously written code as possible. But claiming that 
translation "doesn't work" when no one ever tried to use it is laughable.

view thread (52+ messages)  latest in thread

reply

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Reply to all the recipients using the --to and --cc options:
  reply via email

  To: [email protected]
  Cc: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
  Subject: Re: Multi-language to be or not to be
  In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

This inbox is served by agora; see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox