[Phpwiki-talk] Fwd: multilingual wiki

[Arno H. <aho...@in...>]

Hi all,

a friend of mine had an intersting idea about how to build a real 
multilingual wiki. What do you think about it? Would something like
this work?

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It could be very nice if the Wiki concept was enhanced with
multi language abilities. So people can add there translation
to some pages. But the problem is that if one of the translation
is modified the other must be....
I have may be an idea : create a database of translation of lines
(the original one, not the displayed one)
and not of files. So when a page is computed, the translation
is done line by line with the untranslated part ``as is''.
So a the text file is stored in one or more language.
All the possible translations of lines are stored.
The translation to a language will translate the text file
in the target language, line untranslatable will stay
untranslated.

There is only one thing to add in the user interface,
it is the ``translate page'' command.

It could usable, just an example :
	- Somebody wrote an english page
	  (The text file is in english)
	- Somebody view it as french (but in english on the screen
	  because it is untranslatable)
	- He translates the page to write it in french WITHOUT
	  changing line breaking (with a form with many ENTRIES).
	  (The text file could be in english or french, it doesn't matter)
	- The english page is changed : for the french reader
	  there is some line of english in the french text
	  (The text file is in english because it is in this
	   language it was edited)
	- A spanish translation is done
	  (The text file could be in english or spanish. It could
	   be also in french with some lines in english)
	- The french page is edited by adding some lines
	  (The texte file is in french and english)
	- The spanish and english reader see some text in french
	- The french page is edited to remove some lines.
	  The lines vanish in the other language.
	  (The texte file is in french and english)

The point is that the translator do it line by line and that
lines are not too short.
A + is that translation is done for all the files,
it is not linked to one file.