Hi, Here's some internationalization input to the wiki discussion.
These are divided into Page and Site requirements. E = Essential C = Conditional O = Optional Page Requirements: ---------------- 1. non-ASCII titles: Wiki must allow the creation of pages with non ASCII titles [E] 2. Unicode/UTF-8: UTF-8 must be the only allowed encoding [E] 3. Unicode/UTF-8 Export: Export to other formats, say PDF, should work fine for non-ASCII characters. [E] 4. Right-to-Left Layout/GUI support [C] 5. Configurable per language Special characters entry palette, as per MediaWiki. Allows users to select some characters, rather than type them. [C] 6. Language Tagging: All pages be tagged with the content-language. => authors declare the content-language at page creation time. [E] 7. Translation Linking: All language versions of a page should be cross-linked. That is, source pages should point to available translations; translated pages should point back to source. [E]. (This is part dependent on #6) [Reasoning: a. Translation is not a lossless process. Readers of translated material like to be able to easily refer back to the material in the source language. b. Many users find the source [typically English] versions first - through search, navigation etc. Linking from the English increases the 'findability' of the translations. ] 8. Translation linking to the correct version: Suppose v1.13 of an English page is translated into Korean. The Korean page should link to v1.13, even after the English page is updated to v1.14 etc. Many wikis allow you to view specific page versions using URL parameters, while warning you that it's not the current version. [C] 9. Page Translation Priority: Some core material [install guides, faqs, admin guides etc] would be important to translate. Consequently, it would be useful if authors could rank the translation priority of their material. That way any translation volunteers, could quickly identify the more urgent material. [C] Site Requirements: ------------------------- 10. Search: Presuming the wiki comes with search functionality, we should be able to restrict search to particular languages. This would dependent on #6 above. [E] 11. Internationalized UI: All UI strings should be externalized into resource bundles. Allows for easy translation of UI. [E] 12. API: Translation processes are greatly simplified if there's an API that allows us to move the bits in & out. Moving bits in & out through the UI does not scale. [E] 13. Registration 1: Must be localized [E] 14. Registration 2: Must capture user's language preference, and country. [E] 15. Registration 3: If user registers using the French reg page, then preferred language should default to French. Ditto for other languages. [O]. 16. Notification Emails: - Change notification, registration confirmation etc, should be localized. [E]. 17. Localized Listing: List all pages in my language (just an application of search) [O]. 18. Localized vandalism strategy. Any anti-vandalism strategy for English should also be extended to other languages. [O] 19. Any language content model should clearly scale to support many languages. [E] ~mm _______________________________________________ website-discuss mailing list [email protected]
