Re: Considerations on a Multi-Lingual Site

On Tuesday, November 11, 2003, at 05:31 PM, Andreas Grabmüller wrote:
>> This doesn't solve the problem of how you get the list into the
>> database, but that shouldn't be too hard.
>
> Well, the problem I see is that we need a way for the translators to
> write the list without knowing HTML...

After thinking about it a little more, I realized this is what you were
talking about—not marking up stuff from the database, getting stuff
INTO the database.

If a requirement is that the translators don't need to know html, I
guess I'd go for something similar to wiki markup. Pretty comprehensive
for the needs of the articles. And CSS let's us keep all the
presentation markup separate. Just vanilla tags within the proper
sections lets us style them appropriately.

Ultimately, without having an editor do all the markup, some form of
markup is going to have to be employed—either html, wiki, or something
else. An advantage of html is that (obviously) there's no need for a
special parser. An advantage of wiki is that it might give us a little
more control over relative headlines. We can define, for example,
===Title=== to be <h3> or <h2> or whatever. Of course the html can be
parsed and the headlines renumbered relative to whatever baseline we
want. Or just make things really simple, and let <h1> be the headline
of every article, and define the style of h1 (and others) via CSS.

>> I could see a link with something like "Translate this item" if a
>> translation isn't available in the preferred language of the viewer.

> Difficult - except we want to give everyone access to the
> translations, it does not make sense to offer this link to
> non-translators...

Add a flag to translators' cookies that allows them to see the links?
CSS does allow you to display:none some items, and you could do that
via a simple JavaScript style switcher, but I don't know how secure
that'd be, as the links would still be in markup. Might be better just
to completely leave those links when building the page.

I'm just trying to think of an easy way for the translators to get to
the articles, rather than have to go through some cms system.

> Currently it's handled so if there's no translation the english
> version is used - this won't work any more if we don't have an english
> version, so the question is if the user than gets a 404 - File not
> found message or the content in a different language...
>
>> It might be nice if you could store a language preference order in the
>> cookie. So for example, if I wanted English first, then German, then
>> Japanese, I'd get the translation of the highest preference that was
>> available.
>
> Should be possible. Currently just the one prefered language is
> stored, but I see no reason why we should not allow to store more
> preferences...

And this would get around the "no translation available" problem. The
article needs to be written in *some* language, and you'd get that if
nothing else is available, or nothing is higher on your language
preference list.