Forum OpenACS Development: Re: i18n of content repository content

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17: Re: i18n of content repository content (response to 1)
Posted by Dave Bauer on 05/17/04 04:24 PM
Matthias,

Good points. The knowledge of which language a tranlation was translated from is not interesting except possibly to an administrator.

To a user they should be presented with content in their choosen locale, and optioanlly a list of links to the content in other languages.

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18: Re: i18n of content repository content (response to 17)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 05/17/04 05:28 PM
The knowledge of which language a tranlation was translated from is not interesting except possibly to an administrator.

I disagree. It is important to the user, especially if he does not like the translation, to see what languages the content derived from. This way you can always have a link stating "view the original in language xyz". Furthermore, if the translation is plainly wrong (e.g. documentation), it might help the user to know that this documentation is a translation and *not* the original, therefore having the option to fall back on the original.

It might be my personal preference, but this is why I tend to read documents in the original language as long as I can understand it fair enough. Having read too many german translations and watched too many dubbed movies I think translations are a primary source for misunderstandings and therefore should be clearly marked as such.

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23: Re: i18n of content repository content (response to 18)
Posted by Matthias Melcher on 05/18/04 01:47 PM
Malte,
if we are talking about translations AS content rather than
translation OF content, you are certainly right.

In a class dealing with the critical edition of some French
thinker, for instance, the user should not be automatically
directed to, say, the English translation because his UI
locale is German and, because of the missing German
translation, the default of English becomes active.
Instead, they should be offered all translation items with
all available genesis information.

In contrast, the translations of educational texts of some
arbitrary knowledge domain, should not be allowed to be
so bad that the source needs to be consulted, and some
content management approval procedure would probably
guarantee this quality. Therefore it makes sense to
automatically suggest a translation without bothering the
user with too much choice.

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20: Re: i18n of content repository content (response to 17)
Posted by Jesse Wendel on 05/18/04 04:38 AM
I strongly disagree.

It is important in looking at any content of significance, to know if it is original source material, or a translation.

If it is a translation, the reader should:

a) know what language it is translated from (which may allow one to make sense of gramatical and cultural mistakes in the translation) and,

b) have access to the original source material if at all possible, so one may check the translation for oneself.

Obviously, with OpenACS, both of these should be possible.

Jesse

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21: Re: i18n of content repository content (response to 20)
Posted by Joel Aufrecht on 05/18/04 10:14 AM
So if the original of an item is in German, and somebody translates it to French, and then somebody goes French-English, should the English page have a link "translated from French(link); original document is German(link)"?
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22: Re: i18n of content repository content (response to 21)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 05/18/04 10:35 AM
I do think so. Though this might result in a pretty long translation trail...
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24: Re: i18n of content repository content (response to 21)
Posted by Guan Yang on 05/18/04 03:37 PM
Joel: Why don't we just say that this is application specific?