[i18n] Categories/labels; attribution

[Drs M. Feenstra, MALD, MBA]

First, apologies for my somewhat belated reply; but our youngest daughter
just had (successful!) eye surgery, so I you will forgive me if my thoughts
have been elsewhere during the past few days...

RonL wrote:

> Now, like everyone else, I like to get into and play with the
architectural implications and start designing the solution before fully
defining the problem ...

Agreed! Actually, a key reason for my submitting a "test translation" was
that it might give us an idea of any issues that might come up --and the
categorization was just the first thing that struck me.

> (b) (And I believe evolt is leaning in this direction anyway.)
Implementing a new many-to-one 'tagging' system as seen in slashdot and
elsewhere.  That would allow this particular article to be tagged in both
languages; "Commentary & Society", "Jobs", "Nederlands", "Commentaar &
Maatschappij" and "Banen", etc. so it could be found in any number of future
searches.

Yes, I would like that (although I would probably call it a "many-to-many"
tagging system) --something that is flexible and easy to use. I am not a
Drupal expert; but this *sounds* like something that might be available
either as core Drupal functionality or as a plug-in/modification. Worth
investigating, I would say!

> Let's imagine for a moment that we have a future evolt where we have 250
articles published on CSS-3 ... 50 articles in each of 5 different languages
including at least one RTL (Hebrew perhaps) and at least one language that
requires a non-Latin-1 character set (maybe some mainland Chinese in a Big5
character set from a Hong Kong evolter).

And:

> A quick question and a half:  Are there any characters in the Dutch
article that have diatricial marks?  If there are - will they break anything
in the current evolt structure?  [That would be the only thing I would see
that might prevent us from quickly publishing the article.]

Using an article in Dutch did not reveal any RTL or character set issues
(especially since I had already used HTML entities to encode characters with
diacritics); but clearly this will be *very* different for articles in
Hebrew and Chinese... A good starting point for gathering information might
be:

http://www.developmentseed.org/blog/2008/mar/24/fantastic-rtl-support-drupal
http://drupal.org/node/133977
http://drupal.org/node/142214

> Here are the functionalities I would like to enable:

> (a) I'd like an [x-language] only reader to be able to restrict the search
results or display page to [x-language] only articles and information.  It
does me no good to even see that we have articles available in katakana or
urdu if I can't read those character sets or languages.

> (b) I'd like someone who reads many languages to be able to search a topic
for all articles in all languages.  Sometimes it might be fun to see
cyrillic and Big5 character set articles mixed in with the others on a
particular topic.  {How much more of a world-wide resource would we become
if we merely announced the existence of the browser archive in a larger
number of short articles in different non-Western languages?}

> [I'm thinking there may be some interesting work here in order to display
the search result short summaries in RTL language articles intermingled with
LTR language articles ... but I haven't worked with this so I don't know for
sure.]

> (c) I want to let someone select 5 or so languages and restrict search
results to everything in those languages.  Outside the US there are lots of
people who have more than a passing familiarity with multiple languages.  It
would be really sweet to let someone pick 'English, 'French', 'Dutch', and
'German' and be able to show them all results restricted to that _set_ of
languages.

>(d) Ideally, I might want to allow a reader to set a single or
multi-language preference in a cookie or a logged-in profile and
automagically restrict results to that set.  [And yes, naturally, we would
give them a manual option to override any preset preferences on an
individual search basis.]

Again, I like Ron's ideas. I would add:

(e) I'd like people to be able to subscribe to an RSS feed for articles in
(just) those languages they selected [similar to Ron's (c)]

Erika wrote:

> Therefore, my proposal is that we find something that works *good enough
> for now* with the current article, and then shift focus to the bigger 
> picture stuff, and getting our site running on Drupal 6.6. so that we
> can start to make full use fo Drupal's current functionality.

That sounds like a fine approach to me; these "test translations" may simply
help us discover which functionality we need [to activate] in Drupal 6.x!

--

I noticed that a link back to the original article had been added to the
"snippet" (summary) for the Dutch translation; I think such "attribution" is
an excellent idea! Perhaps we could also add one or more links from the
*original* to any translations? (Currently, it would certainly be overkill
to try and *automate* this --similar to the "altlangs" we use in DMOZ-- but
perhaps that need could arise in the future?)

Marcel