TagBasedTranslationMaintenance

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Add a simple tag indicating that a translation exists

New Tag

: <translation lang="en" id="SiteMap">

which adds the line in the rendered page:

: This page also exist in: English:SiteMap (Last update: 2003-04-17 7:30 UTC)

(note: the prefix redirect to the interface in English on the same wiki)

Benefits:

Ensure that all messages are formated the same way.
Adding the last (major?) update time could help to track outdated translations.
when such a page with such a tag is added, it is perhaps possible

to parse the refered page to see if other translation exists and to automatically update the different translated pages. Example:

I add a french translation PlanDuSite containing <translation lang="en" id="SiteMap">
The script parse the english page
The script adds <translation lang="fr" id="PlanDuSite"> to SiteMap
The script sees that SiteMap allready exists in greek
The script adds <translation lang="fr" id="PlanDuSite"> to the greek page
The script add <translation lang="es" id="XartiTouSite"> in the french page

Implementation:

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/oddmuse/Translation_Extension

New Bar

The rendering of the page could build a list of existing translations (based on the previous tags) that can be use to build a bar like:

: Other languages:[en] [fr]

The links point to the translated page, if no translation is available redirect to a default page indicating that no translation is available and invit the user to translate the text, whith some guidelines link.

For a better visibility it would be better if such a bar is placed on top but I fear it will imply to place the rendered page in memory.

Notation

Instead of a geek-heavy almost XML tag, why don't you just use the InterWiki syntax you will display? Just write English:SiteMap, Français:PlanDuSite, etc. The software can tell if the link is a translation interwiki prefix or not. Thus, you get the benefits of Wiki:WhatYouSeeIsWhatYouGet, plus you reduce the number of variant yet similar syntaxes the user has to memorize, which is a Nielsen user interface heuristic (consistency). -- Anon

You're right and in fact this is what is used on the EmacsWiki. In the case of the implementation above (used for the OddMuse manual) an almost XML tag is used because a version information is added. Of course you can imagine something like French:PlanDuSite:122, but the tag is rendered and indicates if the translation is or is not up to date which is different from the InterMap -- PierreGaston

The particular syntax was chosen because many of the OddMuse extensions already seem to use this pseudo-XML syntax. I'm not sure it is a good idea. Using something that looks like an InterWiki but doesn't act like one (since it will be replaced with specific phrases) is a bad design choice, however. -- AlexSchroeder

MultilingualWiki

TagBasedTranslationMaintenance

New Tag

New Bar

Notation

Discussion