Preliminary handhelds.org translation mechanism

Hi,

I've made some minor hacks to ~httpd/html/include/hh.inc to add
preliminary PHP-based support for non-English translations of
handhelds.org web pages.

You can now publish non-English handhelds.org pages as follows:

  1. To avoid duplication of effort, it might be worth sending a note to
     translation@handhelds.org mentioning which pages you're translating.

  2. Check out the relevant portions of cvs.handhelds.org:/cvs/website.

  3. If necessary, create and commit the left-hand navigation bar include
     file for your language as include/navleft.inc.<language>, where
     <language> is an Internet standard language tag from RFC 1766 (e.g.,
     en for English, kr for Korean, etc.).

     I've already created a sample include/navleft.inc.de for German,
     which I hope will be improved by someone who speaks better German
     than me!

  4. Create and commit each page that you translate as <file>.<language>.

     For testing and demonstration purposes, I've already created
     index.html.de, which is identical to the English page except that
     "What is handhelds.org?" has been translated to "Was ist
     handhelds.org?".

This mechanism doesn't support the Wiki pages.

The website-ng project is an attempt to handle the technical issues of
translation more elegantly than my PHP hack. Until that's ready, I'm
hoping that the current mechanism will allow us to take advantage of all
the generous translation offers that we've been getting.

For the purpose of initializing translation@handhelds.org, here's a list
of people who have expressed an interest in translation so far:

  Lasse Bang Mikkelsen <lbm@fatalerror.dk> (danish)
  Stefan Troendle <StefanTroendle@web.de> (german)
  Diego ALVAREZ RIAL <SIDTDIA@SIDERCA.COM> (spanish)
  Marcellin BUISSON <buisson@cena.fr> (french)
  Peter Korsgaard <jacmet@sunsite.dk> (danish)
  Thiebaut MOCHEL <tmochel@titus.u-strasbg.fr> (french)
  Philippe Jullien <philippe.jullien@makina-corpus.com> (french)
  Kayra Otaner <kayraotaner@yahoo.com> (turkish)

Technical reasons for handling translations in PHP instead of using
Apache's built-in mechanism:

  1. Apache's built-in mechanism requires that every translated page
     has no extensionless variant, so e.g. index.html would need to be
     renamed to index.html.en or index.html.html. Renaming files
     throughout the website in that manner might cause some disruption.

  2. Some human-readable words are stored as PHP arrays, for example the
     navigation bar on the left side of every page. I was unable to find
     a way for PHP to get Apache to apply its language-choice magic to
     such arrays.

     (It doesn't work to do e.g. "requre
     'http://handhelds.org/include/navleft.inc';", because PHP doesn't
     seem to propagate the Accept-Language HTTP header to the Apache
     subrequest.)

Nick
Received on Wed Oct 02 16:42:45 2002