[pmwiki] Re: [Pmwiki-users] pmwiki localization ?

[Bernhard.Weichel@t-online.de]

Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 12:45:30PM +0200,
> Bernhard.Weichel at t-online.de wrote:
>>

> I thought about doing it this way but then decided against it.  I
> don't
> think that we should require non-English pages to retain English
> titles.

This is the price we pay for the fact that the title of the page
is also used as identifier. Since this is the wiki approach, I agree
we should not change that.
But if we also want to translate the pages (not only PmWiki documentation
but also use PmWiki for multilingual Websites) then we should maintain the
relationship between pages somewhere else, perhaps in specific markup.

> So, by placing the pages within their own groups, they can remain
> internally self-consistent, and make references to the English pages
> as appropriate
> for those that do not exist.

Using language groups sounds reasonable, in particular if one of these
days we see a page fallback approach. But then we should also consider
group customization which should not be duplicated manually ...

>
>> It should even be possible to do a proper translation update
>> management, perhaps by maintaining time stamp and a link to the
>> matching english page.

>
> We may be able to do this by adding appropriate markup to the
> non-English pages that links to the English versions of the pages
> they reference.
>

What about adding two markups:

indicate available translations of a page by

   [[translated_to <date> <lang> <link to translation>]]

indicate the fact that the current page is a translation

   [[translated_from <date> <lang> <link to original>]]

If we do not like the redundancy, then I would prefer to indicate
available translations. It could subsequently be utilized to implement
language dependant redirections. It also maintains the translation
status of a page in one place.

It furtheron could be utilized to minimize the result list in search
operations.
I think the user does not expect to see all available languages in the
search
results.

There might be other features such as WikiTrails which should remain
working even when pages are translated.

>> I don't think it is a good idea to rename the pages or the wiki
>> groups unless we have a proper naming scheme which is supported by
>> PmWiki (see also the page fallback discussion).
>
> I think I've decided that if we do ever have a fallback scheme, it's
> going to probably be in the form of fallback groups and not fallback
> pages. I.e., one could look for PmWikiDe.PageName, and if it doesn't
> exist then
> the system falls back to PmWiki.PageName.
>

This would be a nice approach. IMHO we do need some sort of fallback
for internationalization.

> Anyway, we're not committed to any particular approach at this point,
> and I figured it was more important to get something started for
> testing/experimentation than to worry too much about having it be the
> exact final implementation.  If we decide a change needs to be made we
> can still make it without too much work involved.
>

To be honest, I am willing to contribute many German translations. But I
hesitate to doing it without an imagination of the future direction.

Even if we change that direction, it is less work to migrate one approach
than to maintain multiple uncoordinated approaches.

--B