Re: Multi-language to be or not to be

Magnus,

I have to say "I told you so". When the existing translation scheme was
built two+ years ago, I pointed out that it was cumbersome, confusing and
inaccessable and predicted that none of our non-English communities would use
it.

So, my vote is that whether or not we have *an* translation infrastructure,
the current incomplete and non-standard infrastructure be junked. It's never
going to be used in its current form.

Further, we're going to have to expect that some language communities will
never translate the main site, since that puts them in a position of having
all new content generated in English and just having their site mirror that
without the ability to add new content originating in their group. And I
don't think that most of our language groups are large enough to sustain both
organizing content for their site and keeping translations of the English
site updated. Also, a couple of the local site groups told me that they want
an easy-to-use CMS like Drupal, so they're not merging to our site for that
reason.

P.S. Josh D, you are absolutely wrong about our language composition. The
majority of our community speaks a first language other than English, and at
least half of the non-English speakers aren't fluent in English. There are
large communities in Brazil, Spanish-speaking South America, Italy and
Germany -- as well as Japan -- which you aren't aware of because they don't
join the English-speaking MLs for obvious reasons. When I used to answer
webmaster@, for example, I got *more* questions in Portuguese than in
English.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco