Re: Multi-language to be or not to be

From: Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net>
To: Adrian Maier <adrian(dot)maier(at)gmail(dot)com>
Cc: pgsql-www(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: Multi-language to be or not to be
Date: 2007-02-12 09:49:57
Message-ID: 20070212094957.GG4432@svr2.hagander.net
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On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 11:37:16AM +0200, Adrian Maier wrote:
> On 2/12/07, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:
> >On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 10:16:31AM +0200, Adrian Maier wrote:
> >> 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).
>
> Revision number or commit date is almost the same thing. When I am
> looking at a certain translated file i want to know which is the date or
> revision of the corresponding English file. This piece of information makes
> it possible to use cvs diff for seeing the modifications that took place in
> the meantime on the original file.

Not in cvs. Each file has it's own revision number, whereas the date is
ever-increasing. If you had repository revision numbers, this would be
easier.
And yes, we've been talking abuot moving the pgweb stuff into svn
somewhere, but it's not done. And yes, if repo version numbers would
help a lot here, it might be a tipping factor.

What I'm against is having to store the revision number manually in the
file, it seems like a very ugly and unmaintainable solution to me.

> >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.
>
> I'm seeing this quite differently: at first any translation is supposed
> to
> be almost 100% complete, but in time the contents will become old if
> the english pages get updated but the translated pages aren't modified
> accordingly.

Well, once a page is out of date, I'd consider it "not translated". That
said, there needs to be a very clear policy and a way to deal with
it. Certain updates wouldn't need to invalidate the translatino (say a
spelling or grammar fix), whereas certain others will need it to be
completely invalidated right away (say information about a security
issue, where you really don't want out-of-date information in different
languages).

One way I've seen other sites do it is have a banner on the page that
says "this page is out of date compared to the english version. Click
here to see the original one", but that just annoys the hell out of me
everytime. It's ok if it sits there for a couple of hours, but unelss
you have a really responsive translation team it can be stuck like that
for months.

So you really need a policy for how to deal with that. I think that's
another one of the reasons why most translation teams so far have been
rolling their own instead.

//Magnus

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