Dear Sphinx developers,
I'm trying to create a multilingual website using Sphinx, and I post my
thoughts here in the hope to get feedback from you.
1. Introduction
A multilinghual website is a website where the visitor can choose among
several languages. Examples:
- Sites with automatic language selection (using content negotiation):
http://www.debian.org/
http://www.google.com/
These sites ask your browser about your preferred language.
The same URL may return different content depending on your
browser's settings.
- Sites with manual language selection:
http://www.taize.fr/
http://www.b-rail.be
The visitor must choose their language when they enter through the
top domain URL. A given URL will return the same content
independently on the browser's settings.
As far as I can see, content negotiation is done by the webserver, not
by Sphinx. It is not possible on cheap hosts that offer limited
configuration choices.
2. Organizing the source files
I see two possible strategies to organize the source files:
(a) a flat directory structure / Suffixes for each language:
index.en.rst
index.fr.rst
events.en.rst
events.fr.rst
(b) a subdirectory for each language:
en/index.rst
fr/index.rst
en/events.rst
fr/events.rst
I think I prefer (a), because (b) can be confusing when editing several
languages at the same time. But this may be a matter of circumstances.
3. How to do it in Sphinx
In Sphinx you can set a `language` variable in the conf.py. You need to
make a subdirectory for each language. You can add a language selector
to the sidebartoc by defining a custom template::
{% extends "!layout.html" %}
{% block sidebartoc %}
<p>
<a href="../en/index.html">EN</a>
<a href="../fr/index.html">FR</a>
</p>
{{ super() }}
{% endblock %}
(Note that this example is too simple, the links must refer to the
translation of the current document, not a hard-coded index.html)
4. Conclusion
Here's my suggestion for a small change in order to make maintenance of
multilingual websites more easy: If the `language` variable doesn't hold
a string but a callable, then call it before each rendering. With this
change it would be possible to write in conf.py something like this::
def language_selector(docname):
a=docname.split('.')
return a[1]
language=language_selector
After a quick glance at the source code I guess that the following
methods in builder.py need to be changed:
- Builder.load_i18n()
- StandaloneHTMLBuilder.init()
- StandaloneHTMLBuilder.finish()
I stop my thoughts at this point, hoping for your comments, critics,
corrections... or patches.
Thanks in advance,
Luc
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