On 05/27/2010 03:27 AM, Eric "Sparks" Christensen wrote: > > The easy way to do this is to publish all documents in all languages. > That way the guide would be available in English no matter if the text > was translated or not. > > Of course this would mean partial translations would be published which, > in my opinion, are better than no translation. > Actually, we can do it slightly smarter than that; Publican has an option for exactly this use-case: the "ignored_translations" parameter in the publican.cfg file. For example, if "ignored_translations" in the Installation Guide was set for Italian and Spanish, then when you built the book for those languages, it would ignore any PO files available and just build the book using the English strings. For very incomplete translations, I think this is better than a book mostly in English with a paragraph here-and-there in a translated language, but translation teams might have other ideas? I can see two downsides though: 1. It seems wasteful to have multiple copies of exactly the same content stored on the server. It will also make maintaining the site much more difficult if the site image (web.git) grows to something like 40 times its current size. (although this will no longer be a problem when we move to a fully automated publishing system shortly) 2. At the moment, when you see a book in a language menu, you know that it is translated. The situation is not so bad for widely translated languages, but for less widely translated languages, users will click on links and most will be in English; they might not even discover that *any* books have been translated into their language, so the hard work of the translation team gets lost in a sea of English. In case translators have not realised, the menus are now all automatically generated, so it's not possible for us to manually add links any more. I will ask the Publican developer today whether some kind of "cross linking" is possible. Even if this becomes possible, it would solve problem 1 but not problem 2. I wonder if a better solution would be for me to add a prominent notice to the "Welcome" page to tell visitors "to see a full list of all documentation, change the language to English"? Cheers Rudi -- docs mailing list docs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/docs
