[Zope-CMF] translation of CMF 1.1. Request for comments

Robert Rottermann redCOR AG robert@redcor.ch
Thu, 21 Jun 2001 19:55:27 +0200


Hi there,
I intend to start translating CMF 1.1 to German.
We have already done that with the 1.0 revision. We then used the skin
facility. Which worked nicely.
However I do consider translation and customisation to be two distinct
efforts and I rather have a translated version to start my customisation
from.

I therefore intent to duplicate all skin folders in the respective
CMF-directories to have a _int extension. Content becomes content_int and so
on.
In each dtml file within these directories I would use the Tino Wildenhain's
VariTag.
For each language I would duplicate the whole file content and put it
between respective varitags like such:

<dtml-vary language="en">
Copy of the English origin
<dtml-vary language="de">
German translation
<dtml-vary language="de">
French translation
</dtml-vary>
There are several other attempts to be found on the Zope page how to solve
the translation task. They seem to focus on a sentence by sentence
translation which is, to my mind, much more complicated than to translate a
whole file.

Doing the translation as I propose it would be relatively easy to check for
changes when files are updated. Since the original file is still part of the
_int copy we can split it of and diff it against the updated dtml file.
Although this does not provide for automatic merging of code changes into
the translated parts it should make the process much easier.

Before we start, I would hear the opinion of the community. So please tell
me asap if there is a compelling reason not to do it this way.
Furthermore I would like somebody to provide a French translation of the CMF
(any other language is welcome too). So speak up if you want to help CMFify
the non English speaking rest of the world.

Robert