Localization for the Showcase site

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

On Wed, 15 Mar 2000, James Purchase wrote:

> Don't forget that parts of the web-site shall need to be translated into
> other languages to service the "international" flavour I've harped on since
> last year. Is it O.K. if this takes place AFTER the official announcement
> (meaning that the web-site is in English only when it first goes live)?
> 
> Erik, how are you going to intergrate the other languages (or the selection
> of the other languages) into the site?

Here's how we sit on that issue right now (from the technical side):

1. The good news is that every word you read on the site that's not
something from an entrant comes from a "resource table" in the database.  
There are currently about 200 of these resources, ranging from the
guidelines pages all the way down to the individual labels for each entry
fields.

The resource table in turn is created from an ASCII text file with special
markers.  It has stuff that looks like this:

*****@@STRING_ID .htmlheader
AGA International Aquascaping Showcase and Contest
*****@@STRING_ID .button-add-entrant
Add New Entrant
*****@@STRING_ID .button-add-entry
Add New Aquascape
*****@@STRING_ID page.guidelines-contest
<H1>Contest Guidelines</H1>


<P>This section contains information specific to the Contest portion of 
the event.

<ol>
<li><p>Entrants may enter their aquascape in the Showcase without also
entering it in the Contest. This is done through a check box on the Entry 
Form.</p>
.
.
...and so on.

I make changes to wording of the site by editing this file and then
"importing" it back into the database.  This is nice because it's all done
in place while the site is still running.

2. Once we have a translator set up, I can send them the current
english-language resource file to translate.  They send back, say, a
German version, which I then import into another table separate from the
english one. Then it's a matter of telling the program that runs the
website to pick up its strings from the german table instead of the
english one when requested.  I was going to test this feature out by
initially translating everything into pig latin, but I thought better of
it.

3. Now, to get the new language to the user, I'm figuring that I'll use
the language information sent by the browser to trigger this initially,
but maybe have some way to override this via a setting.  I'm not familiar
with the how the language type is transmitted to the CGI layer yet (but
I'm guessing it's via another environment variable).

  - Erik

-- 
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com

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