On 10/11/07, Ivan Sergio Borgonovo <mail@webthatworks.it> wrote:
I've used i18n in the past (4.7?) and I had mixed feelings.
I have read all your email through in the hopes that I will be able to reply, but I would sit here all morning, through to lunch to reply to all your points (two hours to lunch now), so let me give you some pointers instead. It is a good idea to look what is the actual state before throwing (good!) ideas around about how things should be done, and how simple are those actually. I'd suggest you check out the latest i18n and localizer modules (for Drupal 5) as well as the stock Drupal 6 development version which in itself solves lots of problems, including URL aliasing, specific domain names per language, browser language identification and so on. Download Drupal 6-dev here: http://drupal.org/node/97368
First I'd say there are 3 kind of users of a cms: readers, editors and programmers.
I'd sum up what I expect:
Well, yes, there are some specific expectations you have which root in what specific form of multilanguage site *you* are thinking about. There are obviously other and sometimes conflicting needs as well, depending on whether you build a blog, a brochure site, a community site, a social networking website or the online version of a newspaper, and you also need to take into account whether you have internal staff to translate your content, or you employ translation firms, and in the end how much of your site would be translated. Some sites have strict workflows for translations (ie. it is not possible to publish some text until it is available in a few official languages), while others grow more organically, and news items posted from around the world are matched together as translations of each other by some human. To cater for these types of sites, we need wholly different interfaces optimized for the specific tasks. It is quite hard to solve these problems for all the types of sites involved, so Drupal tries to provide a framework, in which site implementors can tailor their solutions to the specific needs. I tried to touch on some of these models (but not close to all of those) in my thesis, which was part of the effort in building up the multilanguage support in Drupal 6: http://hojtsy.hu/files/GaborHojtsyThesis.pdf
oh... and someone more knowledgeable should take into account RTL language too... I've no idea of the problems involved in such kind of localisation.
Well, let me point you again to our latest Drupal version (still in bugfixing), and because we look for improvements to develop from that point, continue any discussion there. Drupal 6 is definitely not a complete multilanguage suite yet, and although it does implement lots of things from which you explained, it leaves room for contributed modules to implement the others. Gabor