[Zope-dev] Making Zope international

[Michael Bernstein]

Martijn Faassen wrote:
> 
> Thilo Mezger wrote:
> [snip internationalisation problems with money and time]
> 
> I'd like to add translation to this; it'd be nice if there was a
> facility in Zope to get the same text in multiple languages in a
> consistent way. I imagine using acquisition could be of service here.
> For instance:
> 
> http://localhost/foo
> 
> Displays 'foo' in the default language.
> 
> http://localhost/English/foo
> 
> Tries to display 'foo' in English, if possible, otherwise displays
> 'sorry, can't translate'.
> 
> http://localhost/Nederlands/foo
> 
> Tries to display 'foo' in Dutch, if possible, otherwise displays 'sorry,
> kan niet vertalen'.
> 
> Is this feasible? You'd need some consistent way to store HTML in more
> than a single language; perhaps a MultiLingualDTMLDocument, or something
> like that?

This topic was touched on about five months ago in the following thread:
http://www.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-January/001132.html
http://www.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-January/001133.html
http://www.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-January/001174.html

In general though, the consensus was that the issues of multiply rooted
hierarchies, multidimensional content arrays, symbolic links, and
explicit acquisition pointers are all interrelated and should be
generalized beyond the issue of different language versions.

As I understand it, more basic architectural issues need to be dealt
with before DC can even think about this problem-space. I for one do not
have the programming skill to implement this sort of thing, though I can
articulate what I'm looking for.

I do know that there is no fundamental reason that ZODB cannot support
other structures such as circular references or bi-directional links,
but that the Zope interface is pretty tightly wedded to the singly
rooted hierarchy.

Currently, two products partially address this problem space: The
symbolic link patch
(http://www.zope.org/Download/Contrib/Pointer.tar.gz) and ZTables, which
will apparently provide some facilities for mapping tabular data to
multiple hierarchical views.

01 (my two bits),

Michael Bernstein.