[development] [VERY LONG] localization of currency, float, dates accordingly to language chosen

[Gábor Hojtsy]

On 10/11/07, Ivan Sergio Borgonovo <mail at 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