Re: Multi-language to be or not to be

On 2/12/07, Robert Treat <xzilla(at)users(dot)sourceforge(dot)net> wrote:
> On Sunday 11 February 2007 16:22, Adrian Maier wrote:
> > On 2/11/07, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:
> > > I'm working on a rewrite and major cleanup of parts of the code that
> > > runs the main website, and came across a thought.
> > >
> > > We currently have support for translation of news, events, surveys,
> > > quotes and pages. So far, we have zero news, zero events, zero surveys,
> > > zero quotes and zero pages translated.
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > In my opinion the translation infrastructure is not complete and does not
> > allow translations to be done easily. It's lacking some way of tracking
> > which English pages
> > were modified, so that the translator would know what pages should be
> > updated.
> >
>
> I've not heard of anyone come up with a better idea than following the website
> commit mailing list... it might be cumbersome, but wouldn't that work?

It is possible to do that , but it is not "easy".

What I am personally missing is just one thing : a nice coloured table showing
the translation status for every page (similar to the NLS status tables, except
that it would contain a revision number instead of a percentage).

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.

> > About 2 years ago, I have started to translate the website to Romanian. At
> > that time I had almost all the pages done, except for the weekly news.
> >
> > I had trouble with setting up a local copy of the website for testing
> > purposes ,
> > then the time passed by without any progress.
> >
>
> Yes, I think we all have that problem. My thinking is that anyone serious
> about doing this would be given an install on one of our development servers,
> but istr there was an issue with you working on a remote host?
>
> > The big question is : how is someone supposed to synchronise his
> > translation with the original English pages (which are updated frequently)
> > ?
> >
> > 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 .

Cheers,
Adrian Maier