Re: Multi-language to be or not to be

On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 10:16:31AM +0200, Adrian Maier wrote:
> On 2/12/07, Robert Treat <xzilla(at)users(dot)sourceforge(dot)net> wrote:
> >On Sunday 11 February 2007 16:22, Adrian Maier wrote:
> >> On 2/11/07, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:
> >> > I'm working on a rewrite and major cleanup of parts of the code that
> >> > runs the main website, and came across a thought.
> >> >
> >> > We currently have support for translation of news, events, surveys,
> >> > quotes and pages. So far, we have zero news, zero events, zero surveys,
> >> > zero quotes and zero pages translated.
> >>
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> In my opinion the translation infrastructure is not complete and does not
> >> allow translations to be done easily. It's lacking some way of tracking
> >> which English pages
> >> were modified, so that the translator would know what pages should be
> >> updated.
> >>
> >
> >I've not heard of anyone come up with a better idea than following the
> >website
> >commit mailing list... it might be cumbersome, but wouldn't that work?
>
> It is possible to do that , but it is not "easy".
>
> What I am personally missing is just one thing : a nice coloured table
> showing
> the translation status for every page (similar to the NLS status tables,
> except
> that it would contain a revision number instead of a percentage).
>
> To achieve this I have the following idea : every translated page
> would contain a
> comment like : <!-- REVISION_NUMBER=xxxxxx --> , where xxxxx is the
> CVS revision of the corresponding English page. It would be the
> translator's job
> to manually write the comment and modify it when he updates the translation
> .
> A script would later scan the files to get those revisions, then get
> the latest revision
> numbers from CVS and present them all as a table.

Would it not be much easier to just check the *dates* on the files? Once
a file is translated, you commit it. Then it can be considered
up-to-date up until the point that the base file is newer than the
translated one (when you change the base file).

You can do this today, but it might certainly help if someone put
togheter a small script to show it in a nice way. There's not much point
to that until someone has actually done some translations, though ;-)

> >> A way to accomplish this might be to write inside the translated page the
> >> CVS revision of the English one, and write some tool which would report
> >the
> >> pages were modified in the meantime.
> >> But this is ugly , and the feature should be provided by the
> >> translation infrastructure.
>
> >Yeah, seems troublesome, though not insurmountable.
>
> My point is that the core of the translation infrastructure is there,
> but it lacks
> an user interface and is vaguely promoted. It's no surprise that the large
> communities that already have their own websites haven't rushed to translate
> the main site for the past 2(?) years .

Right. But will they rush to do that even if we have easier tools to do
it?

There's also the question of wether it's a good thing to have a say 15%
translated site, vs a 0% translated one. If we have a 15% translation,
that will give a very strange impression for people going there with a
browser set for that language - some pages come up in their language,
the majority comes up in a completely different language.

//Magnus