[Pmwiki-users] pmwiki localization ?

[Bernhard.Weichel@t-online.de]

Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 09:38:09AM +0200,
> Bernhard.Weichel at t-online.de wrote: 
>> 
>> 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. 
> 
> Ah, I think this is a decision best left to the site administrator.
> For some sites it may make sense to have pages in different language
> groups have identical titles; for other sites it may be better to
> have differing titles.  PmWiki doesn't have to impose a policy here.

This is true, but PmWiki provide basic functionality which 
allows to implement a particular policy. This is especially true
if a site wants to support multilinguality by policy. In this case
some sort of connection between the pages would be very helpful.

> 
> I'm hoping that the new i18n and translation feature will reduce the
> need for duplication of group customizations...
> 

of course, the language groups can include_once the customization of
the default group.


>>> 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.
> 
> A _very_ reasonable concern.  To be honest, I didn't necessarily
> expect 
> to see _all_ of the PmWiki documentation translated--I figured we'd be
> doing good just having translations for the most commonly used ones
> such as WikiWord, TextFormattingRules, TipsForEditing, etc.  So I'm
> both surprised and pleased to see the interest in providing complete
> sets.
> 

Your initial expectation also supports the need for some fallback approach.

> Now that there are quite a few documentation pages that have been
> translated to French, perhaps people can look at that set and see if
> it's going to work out or not.  My intuition says that this is the
> way to go-- however, I have certainly be wrong before.  :-)
> 

I looked into http://www.pmichaud.com/wiki/PmWikiFr/DocumentationIndex
This page is not really useful since the wiki trail breaks for the
first non translated pages.

We could add additional link markup that provides a fallback -- seems to 
be too complicated.

Or we encourage the translator to create at least dummy pages with 
[[include:]] to the original pages. Or again, we have a specific
markup indicating the need for translation ...

> in others may have translations of the complete documentation.  Who
> knows? But for any particular language the people who likely know
> what's best 
> are the ones doing the translating, and certainly whoever is putting
> in the work to build the pages should have the major say in how they
> are put together.

What I as a translator would like to see is:
 * a proper fallback strategy such that the translation can be performed
   in small steps
 * the flexibility to change page titles but to maintain relationship
   to the originals
 * a proper indicator for necessary updates
 * a proper status report to see the translation status of the site
 * a strategy which keeps functionality such as wiki trails, language
   specific search, refcount

--b