[development] Drupal and i18n, the holy grail?

[Boris Iljadica]

Hi,

this is my first post, and pardon me if this idea was already on the table.
I have to admit I didn't deep dive into drupal code, but nevertheless I will
propose one more approach.

So far I think we have 2 scenarios:
1) translating hard-coded strings in drupal core + modules
2) translating menus + content (user created)


How about tagging the in scenario 2) with language tags:

On example: using single storage, we can store also information about
languages, so for a single menu item it should look similar as this:
<en>about us</en><de>ueber uns</de><hr>o nama</hr>

Processing of the menu item: if user chooses German language, and there is
not German tag in menu item <en>about us</en><hr>o nama</hr>, then this menu
item won't be displayed.

The same is for content:
in one node should be present information for all languages
<en>text, images, bla bla bla</en>
<de>text, bilder, bla bla bla</de>
<hr>text, slike bla bla bla</hr>

When drupal builds up the page, after it loads the node, proper translation
should be processed (if user is on EN part of the site, then  should be
always English content processed from the node.
If there is no content (and menu is there), we can put some default info
message.

Of course this approach than needs changes in GUI so that we can edit each
language content separately (combo box with language selection, some
javascript, some text processing/tagging in background).

Advantage is that we don't need to change table structure.

Drupal core can take care about how many languages are installed and  how to
process adding a new language or deinstalling/reinstalling existing one.


This is just in short.

Regards,

Boris Iljadica

p.s.
I also would like to build multilingual web site in drupal, and so far, for
my case, I think it is best idea to create multisite (3 web sites) for 3
languages sharing photo gallery.
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