[OSGeo-Discuss] Foreign Language Community Support

[Yves Jacolin (free)]

Le dimanche 09 novembre 2008, Christopher Schmidt a écrit :
> On Sun, Nov 09, 2008 at 04:15:38PM +0100, Yves Jacolin (free) wrote:
> > (Hum after reading again your mail, it seems I a little bit
> > misunderstood). So yes all Local chapter are often a good starting
> > point for asking general questions in native langage. There are a lot
> > of local ML for that.
>
> Yves,
>
> Yes, I'm writing text like this (which I intend to request help of
> various local chapters in translating into other languages):
>
> http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/GettingHelp/ForeignLanguageSupport
>
> Unfortunately, I'm having trouble finding easy in-wiki multi-langauge
> support. At the moment, I'm simply putting 'fr:' in front of the page
> title to indicate it is a translation of an English page of the same
> name:
>
> http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/fr:GettingHelp/ForeignLanguageSupport
>
> I'm hopeful that I can find a Trac plugin which does this for me, as
> well as showing when pages that are in different langauges are 'out of
> date' with regard to each other. However, from what I've seen so ar, I'm
> not particularly hopeful on either of these points, so I may need to
> write a plugin myself.
>
> I'm assuming that the Wikipedia-style 'fr:OtherTitle' links are probably
> a preferred way of handling this situation (so that the Page *link* can
> also be in a different language) but I think that would likely be harder
> to handle initially, so I'm not sure I'm going to actually go to the
> extent of tackling that (depending, in part, on what feedback I get from
> the community) -- the URL itself is (I would hope) not the most
> important part of the page, and bad titles can hopefully be resolved
> with adequate linking.
>
> Anyway, feedback on the text of the English page (the french is just an
> earlier machine translation) is welcome.
>
> Regards,

This is an interesting question (How manage I18n content in website). I think 
there are three ways (at least):
* a two letters word put it in the URL, as we  did at the begining in the wiki 
osgeo [1], [2], [3] and like you did in your example ;
* a namespace (if the wiki/website manage this), as I did it in 
http://cartoweb-community.net allowing switching between langage in each page 
(not implemented in the CW3-community website).
* a I18n tag, as we are doing now in the wiki OSGeo [1]

The tag seems a good way to manage easily I18n contents. Not specialy the best 
one IMHO. The namespace is the best way for me. Using Mediawiki you can allow 
people to search only in one namespace, you are really independant but you 
share the same engine for all other langage (better for update). 
Unfortunately, namespace are not always managed by wiki engine and 
contributors need to take care when creating pages.

Y.
[1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Category:Local_chapter_francophone
[2] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Fr_lc_logiciels_traduire
[3] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Annonce_version_fr
-- 
Yves Jacolin
-------------
"Donner la liberté aux individus ne suffit pas, il faut aussi leur donner du
pouvoir, de la puissance d'agir." M Gauchet

"Give freedom to people is not enough, we also have to give them the power 
to use this freedom, to act". M Gauchet
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