As most of you probably know, we're about to internationalize
OpenACS and .LRN. So we're starting to think things through in more
detail, and there are several things that we're not certain of. I'm
going to post a couple of those there.
The background information is the the specs that were used at our
mini-conference in Amsterdam in June, at http://openacs.org
/wp/display/326/409.wimpy.
The problem is: Say you're a university in Germany. Most of your
courses are in German, but some are in English or Spanish or some
other language, either to accomodate visitors, or because it's a
language course. For those course, you want the online .LRN
community to be in English or Spanish as well. Or in Thai.
Say I'm a Swedish exchange student at this school, and I've set my
browser or a cookie saying that my preferred language is Swedish,
something that .LRN happens to support.
Will I get navigation in Swedish and content in German, English,
Spanish, or Thai, depending on the course (i.e. my user preference
always takes precedence over the community setting)?
Or will I get both navigation and content in German, English,
Spanish, Thai (i.e. the community setting always takes precedence
over my settings, meaning my user setting is useless)?
Will I have the option of choosing Swedish in one community, English
in another, and Spanish in a third (i.e. there's a separate user
preference per package instance or community or whateve)?
Isn't it going to be confusing to have the navigation keeep changing
languages? Isn't it going to be confusing for people to keep track
of their locale preferences in each of several subcommunities? (Btw,
I've used language and locale interchangeably in this post.)
On another note: What exactly does it mean to say that a certain
package instance or community is in a certain langauge? Does it
impact what charset is used? The database is supposedly always in
Unicode, so that shouldn't change.
As you can see, there are still a number of issues that we don't
fully understand. Perhaps it's us that are slow, or perhaps they're
just not fully understood. If they're not well enough understood
yet, I'd rather wait with implementing them until we've tried
running a multi-lingual community for a little while. Thanks for
your help.
/Lars