Re: PostgreSQL website translations

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 1:13 PM, Guillaume Lelarge
<guillaume(at)lelarge(dot)info> wrote:
> Adrian Maier a écrit :
>
> > On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 11:49 AM, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:
> >> On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 11:32:28AM +0200, Adrian Maier wrote:
> >> > On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 1:00 PM, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:
> >>[...]
>
> >> > Perhaps it would be useful to have the things that need to be fixed
> >> > added on Trac ?
> >>
> >> That's a very good idea. First we just have to agree on what they are :-)
> >>
> >> I think one big question that we never did solve the last time is what to
> >> do with pages that are out-of-date. E.g. when the english version of a page
> >> is updated, and the translated one isn't, what do we do with it... Show it
> >> anyway, remove it, somehow indicate it... Once we've decided what we want
> >> to do about it, then we can start debating how to do it (which is where the
> >> point of cvs/svn etc comes back in), and start adding tickets for them.
> >
> > When an English page is modified we could :
> > - immediately send a notice to the translators. Automatically added Trac
> > tickets seem to be a cool idea if it's possible.
> > - keep displaying the old translated page for 4-5 days
>
> Nope. If a page is modified, it should just display the english one.
>
>
> > - if the translation is not yet ready we could invalidate the
> > page : move it somewhere else and start displaying the
> > English page until the translation is ready.
> > Or, instead of moving away the page we could add an
> > "outdated page since yyyy-mm-dd" warning .
> >
>
> I don't think we need to move the obsolete translated webpage. The PHP
> code should simply display the english one.

Ok , that's fine with me : the English page replaces the translated page
until the translator updates it.

> > Either way , I think that it would be better to give the translators
> > a few days to do the update before hiding or marking the page.
> >
>
> Nope. There's no reason to do this. If the english page fixes an error
> (content, not grammar or things like this), I prefer to have the fixed
> english one rather than the translated but wrong one.
>
>
> > But first of all, we'll need a good way to store the last_modification_date
> > for each page : each page (English and translations alike) need to
> > be "stamped" with a date or date+time . The date of the svn
> > revision is not good enough because relying on it is the perfect
> > recipe for missing modifications if they are occuring before the
> > translators finishes the translation of a previous version.
> >
> > Here is a scenario :
> > - 8-apr: the English page is modified+committed
> > - 8-apr: the translator starts translating
> > - 9-apr: the English page is modified+committed again
> > - 10-apr: the translation gets committed (but it has the contents for 8-apr)
> >
>
> Oh OK. I understand your example. But if we can't rely on a svn hook to
> stamp each file, I also don't think we can rely on a manual
> modification, do we ?

The core of the problem is finding a good place to store the
correspondance between a given page and its translations.

My point is that we need a way to store information like
"ro/about/advantages.html rev5001 (10-apr-2008) is the translation of
en/about/advantages.html rev4995 (8-apr-2008) " .

It's excellent if this can be achieved with svn hooks , but I doubt that
it's possible.

> > So, I think that we'll need to build some mechanisms for dealing
> > with the page versions/trabslations outside of what does svn offer.
>
> Do you have any ideas of what this could be ?

I'm dreaming of having "something" (some scripts or maybe
or even a web application for translators) that gives:
- the list of pages that need to be modified or that are new
- for each listed file :
* the diff between the "English text that was translated last time
into my language" and "the current English text"
* the ability to download the latest translated text
* the ability to upload the updated translated text

> There's another issue that we'll need to answer : localised search. If I
> remember well Magnus's talk at FOSDEM, the search on www.postgresql.org
> relies on an english only dictionnary. How will french, romanian or
> spanish pages affect the current search feature ?

I can't comment on this (not qualified ... ) .

Cheers,
Adrian Maier