• Diff for "DebianWiki/I18n"

DebianWiki internationalisation

Current situation

• English pages are name like "Hardware"

• Translated pages are named like "de/Hardware" (i.e language code, followed by the English name).

• The English page should be the "Master" page (contributions are made to the English page, then they are translated).

Advantages

• It's liberal
  • It's possible to create a page in German, even if there is no English version (Rarely used).

  • Non-english contributors can contribute actual content, directly in their native language, but that's discouraged (See #TODO).

Drawbacks

• Updating the links to the translated pages is painful:
  1. Each page should link to all alternatives languages (that's boring, but easy to do).

  2. When translating a page, the translator should test each link manually, to know if alternate version exists (e.g. replace DebianLenny with fr/DebianLenny, or not?).

  3. Once a page (eg ?Example) is translated (to e.g, ?fr/Example) the translator should search all the pages in French that link to ?Example, then update the link to the newly translated page: ?fr/Example).

• It is not possible to detect (and disable) a translated page, if it's lagging too much.

• Content negotiation isn't possible: When a user visit a page, it isn't possible to automatically present the best page for him (note that this would solve the 2 problem above!).
• It isn't possible to translate the URL (but that's another story, which may not be a good idea, anyway).

Proposals

Translate using pootle, publish as html

It would be nice is to have a similar behaviour as what's used for www.debian.org (content negotiation):

• The master page for translation is English.

• The page are exported (as docbook, html...) then translated using regular I18n tools (see Debian I18n #1 and #2).

• All the pages are then published as html by apache (with a nice theme which looks like a wiki )

Therefore there are three interfaces for the wiki (which could all look the same, with appropriate theme):

1. visitors use https://wiki.debian.org (the html is served by Apache, which can be mirrored)

2. Editors for the English pages use the plain wiki engine (probably served over https)

3. Translators use a tool like Pootle or DDTSS to do their translation

Pros:

• Fast (the page is served as HTML, using Apache. It's possible to mirror the page)
• Properly translated: Every language have the same quality. If a translation is lagging behind the master page, it can be disable. any we present the English version.

Cons:

• Needs development that no one seems to want to do.

See also

• DebianWiki/TranslationNamespace

• DebianWiki Editor Guide, paragraph Translations.