Re: Multi-language to be or not to be

Guillaume Lelarge wrote:
> 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.

Really? You mustn't have followed -www very closely :-) I specifically
recall having told several people about that - though it's been a while
since someone last asked.

> 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 ?

There's some stuff in the README file:
http://gborg.postgresql.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/portal/README?rev=1.8;cvsroot=pgweb

> 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.

Right, that's what I thought. BTW, I don't think the website currently
has the infrastructure to translate the docs part ;-)

>> 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.

Well, you're one of the maintainers of postgresqlfr.org, right? What are
your thoughts on that vs a translated www.postgresql.org? I'd really
like to hear more from the people who're actually maintaining the
non-english websites..

//Magnus