Forum .LRN Q&A: Improved translation support

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Posted by Peter Marklund on
It is now possible to browse the UI and for each page see a listing at the bottom of all translated messages with any missing translations highlighted. We hope this will be useful to translators. Please try it out at the translation server.
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Posted by Matthias Melcher on
Right now, I cannot even "toggle translator mode".
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Posted by Joel Aufrecht on
I tried to register as a new user.  I filled out the registration form, hit OK, and got an internal error.
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Posted by Matthias Melcher on
I think it is a large step back to sacrifice the inline translation links (those little green circles and red stars) for "templating". Where has the discussion taken place about this, and who decided eventually against the unique innovative translation feature (that could have yielded a considerable competitive advantage in usability)?
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Posted by Lars Pind on
Matthias,

I'm sorry about this.

The decision was mine. There was no public discussion.

The reasons are technical. OpenACS 5.0 has recently completed the the so-called "noquote" project, which aims at ensuring that no HTML slips through the cracks of the user interface. This is a security measure, since if people can get HTML code to execute on your machine, they can potentially either mess up your user interface, cause your browser to crash, or potentially do even nastier things, such as getting access to other web sites you're logged into. It's called cross-site-scripting, and is to be taken quite seriously.

This change closes the very security hole that we were using in translator mode to sneak the "translate this" link into the page.

That, combined with the fact, that translator mode never fully worked, in that from time to time, the translation link would show up as ugly HTML in the page, causing pages to render strangely, made us finally decide to cut it and find a different solution to the problem.

However, dropping killer features is not something we do lightly, nor is it something that makes us happy nor proud.

We were just discussing this, and have an idea for a new approach to this, which may both work with noquote, and work even more reliably than the old solution. We will look into this.

/Lars

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Posted by Lars Pind on
Matthias,

I've reimplemented the translator's interface that you're familiar with. I found a different approach which didn't have the problems associated with the old approach. It's still not perfect, but better.

You can see it in action at the test servers, until we get the trnaslation server upgraded later today.

http://dotlrn.collaboraid.net/test/

Apologies for the interruption in service.

/Lars

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Posted by Peter Marklund on
Matthias,
I updated the translation server with Lars's new translator mode. Please let us know what you think.

Thanks!

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Posted by Matthias Melcher on
Thank you Peter, it is great to have the green circles back. This affects only a small percentage of all messages but the most important ones: those that can incidentally be found via the UI. For the many many other strings, our professional translator waits for cleanup and clarification as mentioned in https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=125235
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Posted by Anja Wicht on
Apart from the fact that we need at least a provisional solution for finding the context of messages, as Matthias Melcher has clearly pointed out in recent messages, it also seems to be a reasonable measure to remove all old messages from the listings. It isn't precisely productive to spend hours and hours searching the code for bits of information just to end up with a "maybe" solution which in the end isn't even needed because it happened to be an old string. Besides, the mixture of old and new messages causes terminological and consistency problems. Please can you attend to this soon and also see to it that the translation server with the eagerly awaited update works properly again (broken pages, bugs, translator mode or similar option)? There's a lot of translation work left to be done and we're running out of time, but currently it's just not possible to work properly.