[Zope] Announce: ZBabel a Translation Assistant for Zope

[Albert Langer]

Thanks for "ZBabel". I've only just downloaded it and haven't played with it
yet, but from just reading through, it looks like it will be a great
approach!

http://www.zope.org/Members/TheJester/ZBabel/

One thing I'm not clear on, which you might want to deal with in future
releases, either by documenting what wasn't obvious to me, or by adding a
separate layer, is how to deal with "Composite Strings". Often a "phrase"
that will need translation is a concatenation of more than one text string
with embedded dynamically generated parameters, such as a date, name, price
etc. In different languages the actual ordering of the concatenated elements
may differ and the structure of the destination language may even result in
a different number of text strings to translate than for the source
language.

Often the original author of a dynamically generated web page will be
tempted to use a repeated string for common parts of different UI strings,
which cannot in fact be translated that way for other languages.

Unless there is some provision for that in the management interface for
translation, and the documentation, page authors are very likely to assume
they have internationalized something when they haven't, because they may
concatenate ZBabelized strings themselves.

See for example:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?URL=/library/books/techlang/de
vintl/D3/S24AA.HTM

I would imagine that Zope is ideally suited to using some sort of class for
each composite, with properties for the phrase identifier and the
constituent dynamically generated parameters, and leaving it to the specific
translation to determine the number and positioning of the elements
required.

Is that already taken into account somehow by allowing the embedding of DTML
within the text phrase to be translated?

Also worth thinking about for a future release, is the integration of this
with layout considerations. Other languages often require 50% more space
than english when translated and this results in layout problems after
translation. Reasonably precise formulae are available for what to expect,
depending on the length of the string and the source and destination
languages. I would imagine that Zope would also be ideal for automatically
generating the maximum of this for the acquired set of expected future
translations and returning it as a parameter that could be used with dynamic
layout.

Finally, is there some way that the "magic" behind Zwicki structured text
formatting could be used, to allow an author to just write the phrase in
their own language and automatically generate related DTML tags for
parameters etc? (Rather vague idea I know, but somehow make it easier for
people just writing content, like Zwiki contributors, to know nothing about
DTML at all, yet still make it easier for scripters to integrate their
translatable content with DTML as well as integrating with HTML layout).