-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi. Some time ago the possibility of using the Mediawiki extension Translate was raised, and at the time you had some serious misgivings. Perhaps you saw the UserBase wiki at an early stage, but I'd like to try to answer your concerns so that it could be discussed further.
"It will kind of force synchronization between the en wiki and others". To some degree this is correct, but only as defined by the administrators of the wiki. The important thing to remember is that the admins (with input from anyone concerned) mark up for translation the English pages where it is basic information required by all languages. Those pages are synchronized fairly rigidly, allowing for freedom in local idiom. Pages where information is specific to one language are simply not marked for translation, and can be written in the appropriate language. An example of that can be seen at http://userbase.kde.org/Translation_Workflow/Chinese * non-localized URLs (instead of w.m.o/en/Home and w.m.o/fr/Accueil (ie, localized title _in_ the URL), we would have w.m.o/Home and w.m.o/Home/fr (English title in the URL) That was a problem originally, but hasn't been for some time. When the translation page is pulled up the first field offered is the pagename so that you can set a localised display name. Yurchor uses this extensively and can give you more detail if you wish. * inconsistent navigation in a chosen locale (tested on the KDE Userbase wiki): - my browser accepts French as a primary language, so content is returned to me in French; - I decide to look at the Spanish version of a page; fine, it works; my intent is to navigate the Spanish-speaking pages now; - clicking on another wiki link will forward me to the default URL, that will be rewritten in French => back to French, where I would have expected Spanish; - right, digging into this, this is because those links are prefixed such as: "Special:myLanguage/Applications" which rewrites to Applications/fr It is expected that the default would be that people prefer to read in their own language. However, should the need arise to do what you describe, that's possible too. In the sidebar is a language drop-down. If you had set that to Spanish, then used links to another page, the Spanish translation would be displayed, assuming that there is a Spanish translation of that page, otherwise it would fall back to the default. I hope that explains it better. Try it out, and ask if you don't get the result you expect. You mention Wikipedia, but that, I think, is a very bad example for distro wikis. The main problem is that someone, for example, puts a really useful bit of information on the German wiki - how does anyone from any other country ever see it? Prior to using the extension we had no tools to help translators know when anything changes. The result was that a translated page could be two years out of date without anyone realising it. Too often the page was never re-visited. The advantage of our system to translators is that they do not have to re-work a long page when something changes. They simply access the messages that are marked as changed, and deal with those. It saves a good deal of time and effort, and because it's easier, it is better maintained. We hope this answers some of your questions, and will be happy to answer any other questions either by email or on IRC. AnneW ([email protected]) yurchor ([email protected]) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk/Y4usACgkQj93fyh4cnBdkMACgh1YyoNuYmFCbbfY7mlhwwCDm vIsAnimtDCvGiuBWsGUvF/PUoIgQkc++ =ycAg -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
