Re: wgo i18n

[Carsten Senger <senger rehfisch de>]

Hi Jens,

thanks for picking that up :-)

Jens W. Klein schrieb:
> Before starting to work on the issues around i18n I need to have 
> definitive requirements. Btw. The wiki is not in a good state to get a 
> picture. But I think I found what I need.
>
> I found some more docs, but took the mentioned posting of Quim Gil 
> (26.Oct.2006) as the base.
>
> Plone offers by default:
>
> - Translation of static parts (in templates and code) using GNU Gettext 
> (PO/POT-Files) 
> - non-western/ RTL (latter using a CSS switch as well)
> - automatic session & browser-language negotation (Plone)
>
> LinguaPlone is an Add-On for Plone to translate content. Is does primary 
> the following: 
> - Translation of all "content" managed by the CMS like text, html, 
>   images, files, ...
> - It build up parallel content-trees, one for each language, url-parts 
>   are included in translation.
> - Only one tree is shown (selected language), the others are hidden 
>   from navigation and search. 
> - Translations are kept together internally using (hidden) references. 
> - offers simple UI to manage translations.
>
> also it should be possible to assign editor permission to only one 
> content tree or subtree (or single document). I just fear its difficult 
> to allow people to create the translated document.
>
> Next lets come to problematic parts:
>
> 1) Partial translated content. 
>
> For all static parts this in no problem, but work to be done. For content 
> it can be a problem.
> For WGO english is the (in LinguaPlone terms called) 'canonical' 
> language. As I said LingauPlone work internal with parallel content-trees 
> if a user switched to spanish and there are untranslated documents, those 
> are not shown. Theres no fallback. Some time ago I build an addon called 
> BlueLinguaLink which helps setting proxy-links to the version in the 
> canonical language. I'd need to update it to make it work with Plone 3.2 
> and latest LinguaPlone.

I had hoped there are replacements for navigation, search, listings etc. 
that mix in the missing parts with the canonical language. (Just in the 
mood to be naive ;)

From the discussions I read about the expected organizational problems 
with translations I expect the gnome site to have the wast majority of 
content in English only. Having a big percentage of stub pages ("no 
translated - read in english here") or pages not at all visible in 
another language BlueLinguaPlone does not seems to fit. (If I read the 
documentation for BlueLinguaPlone correctly it is a manual task to set 
up stub pages.)

But I can't provide alternatives. Just my 2 cent.

> 2) translation workflow with XML export/ import. 
>
> I dont know any good tool for such a workflow. I think Sasha from 
> Valentine talked about an xml-based workflow with translation-offices 
> some years ago at a Plone Conference. If this is really needed I can dig 
> into this to see if there are solutions around. 

This is one of the requirements that should be drop imho, or at least 
postponed until after we have an releasable version.

> 3) "work on translation in non-public environment" 
>
> I'd use working-copy-support to have a live version online and a private 
> working version to edit. This is new in Plone 3 and works fine (even if I 
> never tested it together with LinguaPlone, what I'll do now).

Sounds good. We have to look at this combination for folder checkouts as 
they already have some unexpected behavior like loosing added content 
even without LinguaPlone. I think kapil worked on the checkout adapters 
to only checks out the bare folder, not it's content.

> Can you please comment and add missing features?

I read about one additional feature request, I think on this list during 
the last year:
Have an overview which parts of the current page are already translated 
and which need to be done. Especially if the canonical version was 
edited after it was translated.

Displaying which parts of a page a translator omitted the last time is 
impossible. But it may be feasible to annotate the translation with the 
 version number of the translated canonical content. Then we can link 
to a diff between the last translated and the current canonical content 
version.

As the gnome site will have translations that are only occasionally 
revised, this seems to be important for their translation workflow.

I'm not aware of additional requirements.

..Carsten