Re: Considerations on a Multi-Lingual Site

On Tuesday, November 11, 2003, at 08:03 AM, Andreas Grabmüller wrote:
> It's difficult to create elements like lists without knowing HTML.

Couldn't it be done along the lines of building selects? Say you've got
an array of list items:

$list_array = array ('apples','oranges','grapes');

$list_string =  '<ul>';
foreach $list_array as $this_item {
    $list_string .=  '<li>'.$this_item.'</li>';
}
$list_string .= '</ul>';

This doesn't solve the problem of how you get the list into the
database, but that shouldn't be too hard.

>  I think we have two options here: a bbcode parser that allows some
> input like the popular bulletin boards do or using a WYSIWYG editor

A bbcode parser would probably be adequate. Wiki markup isn't too hard
and parsers are easy to come by.

> If a translator creates a page in its own language, should it be not
> available to other languages or appear in that foreign language for
> the english people? Should they be able to change the menu (just for
> their own language or for all)?

I could see a link with something like "Translate this item" if a
translation isn't available in the preferred language of the viewer.
That then brings them to the bbcode page (requiring whatever
authentication you want, if you want to limit the translations to be
done only be authorized translators).

As for what news is displayed, I think it might be a good idea to
display all of the items, with as many translated as translations are
available. For languages that haven't got a full version of everything
translated, you might get some pretty sparse pages, and people wouldn't
necessarily know what they're missing.

It might be nice if you could store a language preference order in the
cookie. So for example, if I wanted English first, then German, then
Japanese, I'd get the translation of the highest preference that was
available.

This may have already been hashed out. I haven't looked closely enough
at that section of the code yet.

Michael