[limesurvey-developers] Remote survey translation

[Andrie de V. <apd...@ya...>]

  Dear development team

A quick introduction:  I am Andrie de Vries, owner and research director 
at PentaLibra, an independent market research firm based in London, 
England.  I specialise in surveys, statistical analysis and strategy.  I 
use LimeSurvey for in-house survey hosting, and R (the R-project for 
statistical computing) for statistical analysis.

First of all, thank you and congratulations with creating a marvellous 
piece of software!

On a recent project, I had to translate the survey from English into 
Chinese and Japanese.  I made use of the code originally written by 
CasN, but had to rewrite most of it to work with LimeSurvey 1.90.  I am 
now quite keen to contribute this back to the project, to ensure that it 
stays up to date with future releases.

On the LimeSurvey website, there are three active discussions of this 
feature:
1) Bug tracker: http://bugs.limesurvey.org/view.php?id=1735
2) Ideas: http://ideas.limesurvey.org/ideatorrent/idea/205/
3) Forum: 
http://www.limesurvey.org/en/support/forums/6-development/49852-survey-translation#49852

You can view a demonstration of the code in action here:
http://surveys.pentalibra.com/translator/starttrans.php?sid=29846

My code has been used on my production server for a real-word project, 
by translators in China and Japan, so I know it works.

However, to productise this to the mainline, at least the following 
needs to happen:
1) Decide on a security model
At the least, each survey should be flagged in the database as being 
allowed remote translation.  My solution is to create a flag on the 
surveys table, and allow translation only when this flag is set to 
true.  The flag can be set by the administrator on the survey 
administration screen, i.e. I created a new tab with one field with a 
yes/no setting.

2) Modify the LimeSurvey installation and upgrade script to create this 
new field on the surveys table.  I have (tested) sample code to do this, 
but at the moment this is standalone, and needs to be integrated.

3) Decide on a presentation style.  As I see it, there are two options.
Option (a) is to present the translation screen to the user outside of 
the LimeSurvey admin system, i.e. in the style of surveys.  This look 
and feel will then be customizable using CSS templates.  The benefit is 
that the translator doesn't have to log in to the LimeSurvey admin 
system.  This is the approach I have taken.
Option (b) is to build the interface into the admin system.  This will 
require creating a new user security profile of translator, and will 
require the translator to log in.

4) Decide on a location for the files.  At the moment the file location 
is root\translator.  This is possibly appropriate for option (a) above.  
However, it may be more appropriate to put the files in \root\admin\

5) Modify my code to be more robust for generic database support.  At 
the moment it makes use of PHP calls to mysql.  I am aware of the 
abstraction layer for generic database support in LimeSurvey, but will 
have to modify the code to make use of this.

6) Modify html.php and database.php - I know what changes should be made.

7) Modify code to enable HTML FCKeditor.  At the moment I strip our HTML 
tags, and present the code to the translator in PHP input text or 
textarea fields.

There are some other details to consider, but this is probably better 
dealt with at a later time.

Regards

Andrie



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