[Zope-CMF] How to translate CMF, first summary

[Joachim Werner]

> But as soon text to display and html code is intermingled things become
> tricky.
> The following sentence has to be rearranged when translated to German:
> <p>This item is in <b>&dtml-review_state;</b> state.</p>
> becomes:
> <p>Der Status des Elementes ist : <b>&dtml-review_state;</b></p>
> This only works when I translate Text and html code together. I can not
> separate the two.

You really should have a look at ZBabel. It CAN translate the above because
you can use placeholders in your translations. It looks like that:

de: "Der Status des Elementes ist: <<<1>>>"
en: "This item is in <<<1>>> state"

> This is what I call to translate screen wise.(not all situations are that
> straightforward the code might be some paragraphs long)
> (is tere an other way to do it ??)

With ZBabel you translate a screen only once (into an
internationalized/tagged version). Later, you just have to fix bugs in the
internationalized DTML or Python code. The translation is kept untouched as
long as you don't have to change the actual phrases.

> And more importantly: It was VERY! hard for the translator to do his job
> when he got a couple of thousand pieces of text of which he did not know
the
> context.

That's a good point. But it can be solved by providing a good front-end to
the translator that maybe displays the context with the string to be
translated.

> The only translating support I can imagine is wrapping "candidates to
> translate" into function that render the text translated. (I do not yet
> grasp the workings of your approach (building on pythons gettext facility)
> but I understand it also wrapps sentences in function calls.)
> So the question is who does such wrapping and more importantly will it pay
> off.

Again, that is what ZBabel (and also the gettext-based Localizer) are doing
already ...

> I do not mean we should not have any help by DC. However it is enough to
> wrap DTML-calls that render a text to display in a function call that
> translates them. So instead of  <dtml-var review_state> <dtml-var
> "translate(review_state)">. Furthermore all raise statements that render a
> displayable text should also be wrapped in such a function. There are a
> couple of more things to do but for CMF it would sum up to work for about
a
> day.

We even put the ZBabel translation engine into the var tag. The only problem
with that was that virtually everything was translated, sometimes a couple
of times, as <dtml-var> might call methods that call methods etc. ZBabel
even started translating its variables, which leads to recursion problems.
But the code is there, and the only thing needed to make it really cool
would be adding some additional attribute like this:

<dtml-var variablename translate>

But such a syntax is not any better than using ZBabel's own tags as long as
the syntax is not officially accepted. It would break all existing code when
it is used with a Zope instance that does not have ZBabel installed.

Joachim