Re: Multi-language to be or not to be

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.

> 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 ;-)

Yep , you are right.

> > >> 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?

Maybe, who knows... At the present it's quite scary to begin translating.

> 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.

--
Adrian Maier