[support] The quest for a fully Bi-Lingual site

[Neil: esl-lounge.com]

Well, tri-lingual to be precise but you get the idea. I am trying to put together an Italian/English/Spanish site and I'm about 95% there. 

But there seem to be some real problems and I thought I would come to the all-wise Drupal mailing list to see if I could get some help with at least a few of them.

I have put together a short list of the strings that are still causing me problems - things I don't know how to translate. I've also added a few possible solutions, ideas I've had for each. Any help given on this subject will be much appreciated.

1. Logo in English: we have a logo with an English tagline.
Solution: Drop the tagline from the logo
Solution: work out how to do conditional statements with the main site logo in drupal.
Solution: leave at it is. It's only a tagline, afterall!

2. Pre-fill "enter keyword here" in search box. In our search box, we have this entered by default in the text box using Javascript:
  <input type="text" id="indexsearch_box" name="search" value="enter keyword here" onFocus="this.className='active'; if(this.value=='enter keyword here')this.value='';" onblur="if(this.value=='')this.value='enter keyword here';this.className='passive';">
Solution: drop it completely. How important is it?
Solution: Try to find a way of doing php conditional statements with the javascript that is producing this. Not optimistic about that.
Solution: Leave as it is.

3. Contact form dropdown. We use the site-wide contact form and on that page, there is a Category dropdown for people to specify what they are writing about. These are not translatable, it seems.
Solution: lose the category dropdown. How important is it really? We could theoretically select to have different categories of mail go to different addresses but are we really going to do that? We already have the subject text field. That suffices, I think.
Solution: different contact forms for different languages. This is a realistic possibility. Others have done it. It requires making new forms from cck, but the problem is that you need to make a submittable form, which is not as simple as making a static content type. How hard is this to do? I have seen others suggesting using ONE other type of contact form for another language...we may end up with 5-6 other languages so we need an expandable solution.
Solution: Leave as it is - I think this is a little bit too much English for an Spanish/Italian user though and looks "ugly".
Solution: send Italian users, for example, who click the footer link to an Italian contact page (simple enough, we already use conditional php for our menus to alter link text and URL destinations) where you just have a simple mailto link. Cheap and cheerful. It's the cheap version of solution 2.

4. CCK dropdowns. Most of our CCK fields are location-based dropdowns (in profile) or empty fields for text to be submitted in. The labels are translatable....Nationality, Address, Age, etc. The problems come from fields where we have entered "Allowed Values" which can't be translated. For example, we have a CCK field in our nodeprofile "Hobbies" where we have a dropdown list with 20 hobbies that users can select multiple items from.

What solutions exist for CCK field allowed values? We could turn them all into free form text fields but then we lose control over the imputted values totally.

5. Forum descriptions and container names. We have a container called "Regions" which we can't translate. We have other regions called "Site Information" and "Site Help" which seem again untranslatable. Worse, we have forums whose descriptions read something like "Post here to ask questions relating to Central America". How can this be translated?

Solution: drop the descriptions. Forum titles make it obvious what goes where. This is not really true and there'll be confusion.
Solution: put short, succint descriptions. Trim down the fat from sentences. "Central America Forum" is better. But what about descriptions of other general forums such as "Requests for help. Unsure how to do something? Ask your questions here." They can't be simplified.
Solution: the forum link for Spanish and Italian speakers can be changed. They could be sent directly to their own forums, which will exist. They would still have the breadcrumb links to be able to navigate up to the top level but it's a better solution. Even more, we can give them their own sub-forums for Help, Suggestions, etc just as there are for English speakers. Italians and Spanish speakers would quickly learn that the main Forum link brought them to "their" forum area even though English speaking forums existed.
Solution: is there any way to hack forum.module to get forum descriptions wrapped in t strings or is this a big no no?

Once again, thanks for any assistance that you can give me on these issues.

Neil
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