[Zope-PTK] Internationalization

[Jochen Haeberle]

Hi,

as a german, Internationalization is very important for me in two areas:

1) I like the idea of wizards to make life easier for content
managers. But the people I know over here who are going to be content
managers would struggle on the english language of the wizards.
Translating the wizards would surely be possible, but it is not the
best way, because the work will be lost when you update the PTK or
other product.

I imagine a system that offers hooks to do translation of Wizards on
my own or use predefined translations. I know this is not interesting
to most Zopeists, but languages other than english generally gain
influence and mass on the internet, so it might be/get interesting.
Nevertheless, english should be the standard language, but a tab to
start a new language for the wizard would just be it. I would name it
to be the "german" version of the wizard and go through the pages and
translate the text. At this moment, the original english texts will
be cataloged.
If there is an update of the PTK or other product, a "Translation
Wizard" would guide me through the pages that are new or contain
changed text, so I can easily review my translations.

For us europeans, doing _one_ translation usually does not do it,
often, we need several languages for users of different countries...
english, french, spanish, german,.... so this should be seen to as
well.

2) Content in several languages. This is very important to me and is
not that easy if you need some sort of translational service for the
content. For example, if my site is located in Germany, probably all
content entered will be german (let's speak of a corporate site), but
there might be need to offer some or all content translated to
english, french,... as well. Many people might be able to provide an
english translation, but professional services might still be a
need... :-) and rarely people speak more than one foreign language if
any.
For the systems I build with server side scripting I used the
approach of setting one language as default where I know that a text
will be available for sure (german normally). Several other languages
could be added to the db at once or later. I also had a system with
eMail-Notification to a translator who then logged in and translated
new texts to turkish. The online-manager could decide which articles
were to be translated.
The language of a user will be determined by settings in the language
tab of the browser (offered by all the modern browsers). The server
tries to grab a language version by the preffered settings and if
existant. If it is not existant, it offers a message that the content
in question is not (yet) translated and falls back to the standard
language.
For a larger system with content management I guess a reviewer would
need the ability to set a property that a text is to be translated
and by whom.
A translator probably could be a new role in the portal context and
has his own view where all the articles that are to be translated
were shown (possibly with a time to be done). The management view for
a reviewer would hold information about the translations done (for
review or billing for example) and the ones on hold...

BTW. this might be important for the general contributors area as
well. The current PTK doc says that a Contributor can request
inclusion in the public catalog.... is there a way the contributor
can learn about the state of his request (accepted/modiefied/rejected
on xx/xx/xxxx because of yyyy)??


Over here in Europe is a big need for products that offer support for
several languages and general internationalization. Zope could get a
much bigger impact over here if a clever language support and
solutions to the mentioned problem were available.

I hope you find these ideas valuable and could find some time to
include them into the PTK!

Regards

Jochen