[Zope-CMF] How to translate CMF, first summary

[Juan David Ibáñez Palomar]

> 
> There were also some statements regarding the advantage of translating
> sentences versus translating screens. The main argument was that translating
> sentences helps to avoid translating the same sentence more than once.
> My points against this reasoning (stemming from my experience with preparing
> the translation of many non Zope programs) is that not so many sentences are
> repeated.
>

No, in my opinion the main advantage of sentence by sentence translation
is that the logic/presentation and the translations are separated. This
has two benefits: the programmer writes the code, the designer builds
the user interfaces and the translator translates; all of them use familiar
tools, the translator could use the same tools to translate for example
a GNOME application or a Zope product (if Zope supported the same de facto
standard of course) and don't needs to know anything about the technology
(DTML, ZPT, Python, ...).

The other advantage is that the update of the translation to a new
version of the software is easier since usually most of the senteces
remain unchanged.

Some time ago there was an important effort to translate Zope using
zzLocale, a product that follows the approach to translate screens.
It was Zope 2.2, but then Zope 2.3 was released which made important
changes in the web interfaces, and the work was lost.

Sentence by sentence translation should be used in the web interfaces
and in the messages returned by Python code.

But other parts, for example the on-line help system, should use a
different approach, one file per language.


Best regards,
jdavid