Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Fwd: multilingual wiki

[Steve W. <sw...@wc...>]

On Mon, 6 Nov 2000, Arno Hollosi wrote:

> 
> 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?
> 
> ------------------
> 
> 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.

The mSQL implementation is partly this way now... lines from the page are
stored in individual rows of a page table. (This is because mSQL cannot
search text blob types). So it wouldn't be hard to hack in, probably just
add a new column indicating what language the line is in, defaulting to
the local language.

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


This might be the tricky part to implement though...

> 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).

If I follow, at runtime a form is generated with a TEXTAREA for every line
in the page, along with a second TEXTAREA for translating the line.

> 	  (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.

It's interesting to think that all language versions of the pages are
stored together, but in the long run keeping all the versions in sync
would be hard. However if the Wiki were not too big, and the focus on only
two languages, it might not be that hard.

sw

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