> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Chad Zimmerman
> Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 1998 3:55 PM
> several mirror sites that are written in different languages but
> are all the same information.
>
> Hmm, dynamic database driven site with on-the-fly language conversion ....
> anything like that exist yet?
No, and it will be a very long time in real (not net) years until
computer language translation will be colloquial and correct enough
that the results will be appropriate for educating kids. No matter how
good the original (Japanese, say) material, its translation into
wretched French will destroy its value.
The question therefore is how do you structure a set of web sites such
that they all have approximately the same material, functionality, and
appearance but in different languages. You should probably assume that
additions will be made in any of the languages to its corresponding site
and then must be propagated into the others by (human) translators
working on a volunteer or ad-hoc basis.
There would have to be a mechanism by which additions to one site are
brought to the attention of people capable of translating it into others,
plus tools to help do the translation (HTML text, text in images, strings
in the scripting languages that will be displayed (menus, etc.)) and add
the results to the target site. This would ideally assume that the
translators know little or nothing about computers in general and HTML,
Java/JavaScript, and Unix/Win in particular.
A difficult problem in web design, to the point that one might ask "why
bother?" Why not just leave each country to do its own educational sites
in its own language? Because that would be isolationist, ethnocentric,
and the opposite of what we're trying to do. Note, for instance, that
having parallel sites in multiple languages would be great for making
kids multilingual.
Bob Munck
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