[support] I18n questions and troubles

[Pierre <pounard> Rineau]

On lun, 2008-04-28 at 11:23 +0200, Ivan Sergio Borgonovo wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:16:59 +0200
> "Pierre <pounard> Rineau" <pounard at processus.org> wrote:
> 
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I have some basic questions about i18n module, hard to explain, so
> > there is a basic use case :
> 
> > I have two languages, french (fr) and spanish (es);
> > I have to translate every node to both language (so I use the
> > "translations" tab to create and link nodes from both languages),;
> > 
> > I have only one big menu, which is translation enabled (so one
> > entry for both language, but translated);
> > 
> > Let's say I have a french node: "node/XX";
> > and its translation in spanish: "node/YY".
> > 
> > The question is, when I go to path "fr/node/XX", my french node is
> > displayed, but when I switch to spanish, cliking the spanish
> > language switch link, my new path is "es/node/XX", does the i18n
> > module automatically switch the displayed node to "node/YY", or
> > does I always have to manually switch the path to "es/node/YY" ?
> > 
> > The problem behind this is my menu is the same in french and
> > spanish, so when I click on a spanish entry from the menu, the path
> > will be the french node's path, but prefixed with "es/", but my
> > french node is always displayed, which is not what I want...
> 
> What I did to recycle menu was to use an agnostic menu and locale
> that just translate the text.
> i18n take care of the language prefix in the path.
> The only draw back is the overall path is not translated.
> 
> So you've a menu entry that is eg.
> d1/documents (path in the menu entry) and Documents as text
> i18n will prefix the path with the language
> localisation will translate Documents into eg. Documentos[1]
> 
> Then you write the es and fr version behind d1/documents with
> es/documents and fr/documents path.
> 
> When you're in es mode the menu will take you to
> es/documents and the menu text (provided you translated it with
> localisation) will show Documentos.
> When you're in fr mode the menu will take you to fr/documents and the
> menu text will show Documents[2].
> 
> What I haven't been able to achieve is having the path translated
> too... so that Documentos will take you to es/documentos and
> Documents will take you to fr/documents.
> I think it is achievable but I never dig into it enough.
> In my use case users tend to switch between language if they are not
> finding what they are looking for, since not all translation have all
> the pages.
> So I provide different taxonomies for different languages that are
> always visible and I use the above trick just for primary links so I
> do have taxonomies translated... even if users can't switch between
> taxonomies of different levels... but they can try to switch between
> articles, and articles provide a bridge between taxonomies.
> It would be nice to have a bridge between taxonomies with a fall back
> system that takes you to the nearest point between languages, since
> in my use case not all languages follow the same dev path it may
> happen that some leaves of a taxonomy in one language are missing.
> 
> It depends on your use case... if you feel that path are important
> you may put more effort into actually translating and mapping
> everything.
> 
> 
> [1] I just saw an Italian advertising that says that it is not enough
> to add an s to every Italian word to make it Spanish, but I think at
> least this one is correct
> [2] this time I had to check with Google.
> 
> -- 
> Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
> http://www.webthatworks.it

What I figured out until now is there is two clean ways of handling a
multilingual site:

1) Use two menus, one fr, the second es, and try to synchronize them
manually every time you have to add an entry.
With this option, no worries about the pathes, because you have one
entry per language, so you can specify the path you want for each
language.

2) Use one menu, translated, and set to aliases for each translated
page, the fr node is fr/myalias, and the es is es/myalias.
The problem with this one is YOU HAVE to set a path for each node you
want to be translated, and then you can't translate these pathes.

I'm currently orienting my choice to the second option, because
maintening two menus, when there are someting link about 100 entries is
to much work, but this is fastidious to set a path to every page..

The problem beside this, is there is no real synchronisation between
translated nodes, all informations are duplicated (owner, rigths,
taxonomy, etc), this is BAD because synchronisation is hard to maintain
in time, and if I go to node/120 (fr), but browsing in spanish, this
will be more convenient for users to land on the spanish translation
without having to worry about pathes and menus.

I will be glad to ear every other simple solution you have :)