Re: www.LANG.gnome.org translation

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

sön 2004-12-12 klockan 02:09 +0100 skrev Francesco Levorato:
> In my opinion, all sites of the form www.LANGCODE.gnome.org should be a
> _translation_ of www.gnome.org. With translation I mean, same content
> (translated of course), same graphics, same place for links (after all
> one of the GNOME main concerns is about usability, isnt it?).

All sites of the form www.CC.gnome.org are originally supposed to be
*country*-specific GNOME community websites, managed by the GNOME
community in that particular country, if there's an interest in doing
that by the local community.

I say "originally" as some sites, in particular www.es.gnome.org, has
evolved from being a country-specific site to being a common website for
a language-specific GNOME sub-community (the Spanish-speaking one), but
this is an exception.

It is important to realise that the CC doesn't necessarily have anything
to do with language(s), nor does the GNOME Foundation or the "main GNOME
community" control the content of these sites.


> Sites of the form www.gnome.LANGCODE should be free to follow whatever
> design they like, since they are not subdomains of gnome.org.

We don't have a www.gnome.LANGCODE scheme and couldn't possibly have
one, as TLDs are supposed to be country codes, not language codes (which
often aren't the same¹).

The www.gnome.CC sites, using country code TLDs, are supposed to be
registered and managed by the country-specific GNOME communities, in
case there is an interest in doing so.

Some GNOME country sub-communities have instead opted for a
www.CC.gnome.org solution as discussed previously, as the www.gnome.CC
registration option proved to be difficult (due to rules for that TLD)
or impossible (e.g. someone else has already domain-squatted the domain
in that country).


That being said, I think offering translations of the main www.gnome.org
web site could be very useful. But that should be done on the
www.gnome.org site.
Also, it should involve automatic content detection, preferrably as
Danilo suggested², and an optional manual way for the user to easily
override the automated selection.
Last but not least, the GNOME Translation Project should be involved for
doing the actual translations, and it would be much useful to integrate
the web site translation with other translation efforts done by the GTP
(read: if not integrated, it isn't likely to be attractive for the GTP
translators). This probably means using the gettext/PO file translation
framework as currently used by the GTP.


Christian



¹ ISO 639 language codes: http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/
  ISO 3166 country codes: http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/02iso-3166-code-lists/list-en1.html
² http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2004-December/msg00058.html