Re: Multi-language to be or not to be

Magnus Hagander a ecrit le 12/02/2007 10:36:
> On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 10:16:10AM +0100, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>> Am Montag, 12. Februar 2007 09:50 schrieb Magnus Hagander:
>>> Right. But will they rush to do that even if we have easier tools to do
>>> it?
>> I would love to translate some pages, but frankly anything short of a PO file
>> or some equivalent technology isn't going to excite any translators for long.
>
> A .po file is easier than a plaintext file? Well, I'm don't do much
> translating myself, but I can't see how translating a webpage can be
> easier than translating the actual text of the webpage in the file...
>
> (We do have .po files for the strings that come out of the PHP code
> directly)
>
> As for news and such, there's a web interface. Are you saying that's
> also too complex? Frankly, I don't see how a .po would make that better,
> but again I'm not used to working with these things.
>

Honestly, I didn't know there was a way to translate the main website.
Renaud Fortier and I did the translation on pgAdmin's website because
Dave told us it was possible. I think keeping the translation part of
the code is really necessary. I would be glad to provide a french
translation of the www.postgresql.org website. But I don't know how. And
a few days back, I didn't know we could do it. Is there a document
describing how to take care of this ?

Using po files is really easier when you don't have big pages or
documents. They are really useful for apps' translations and websites.
But they could be nightmare for things like manuals, books.

>>> 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.
>> By that theory, no translation of open-source software would ever take place.
>
> Well, I stand by that opinion. I know for examlpe pgAdmin only ships
> translations that are n percent or better (iirc, it's 85% or so), which
> makes it reasonable. Shipping something that only has 15% translation
> rate does the user a disservice, imho.
>

I agree on this. And it's really easy to get the percentage with po files.

Regards.

--
Guillaume.