[interchange-i18n] Internationalizing Foundation

[Stefan Hornburg Racke]

Mike Heins <mheins at redhat.com> writes:

> Dear All,
> 
> We will be starting the internationalization effort on Foundation 
> in a few days.
> 
> Obviously, we will need help with translation, but we also have
> quite a few issues to decide.
> 
>     1. Internationalized pages -- should we start fresh and have a
>        pages_i18n directory in addition to the default US-centric
>        pages? How about templates/regions and templates/components?

I don't think we need completely separate page trees. IMHO it
is not necessary and is bad for maintenance. It may make sense
for some pages to have separate versions for US and i18n.
 
> 
>     2. Product database structure. There are several options:
> 
>        a. One big table with new columns description_de,
> 	  description_nl, etc. This is my least favorite.
> 
>        b. Separate tables for each language, with empty fields falling
> 	  through to the default products. Basically, this means
> 
> 	    Locale de_DE ProductFiles products_de products Locale
> 	    nl_NL ProductFiles products_nl products
> 
> 	  etc.
> 
>        c. Separate tables *not in ProductFiles* with product
> 	  description information.
> 
>        There may be more that others can think of.

We could use the LocaleDatabase too.

> 
>     3. Pricing -- should we provide easily selectable ability to
>        maintain separate prices for each currency or should we
>        concentrate on PriceDivide.
> 
>     4. Checkout forms -- should we build a different form for each
>        locality, or try and do one big form?
> 
>     5. Text messages -- should we use
> 
> 		[L CODE]The text.[/L]
> 	 or
> 		[L]The text.[/L]
> 	 or
> 		[LC]
> 			The text.
> 			[de_DE] Der text [/de_DE]
> 			[es_ES] El texto [/es_ES]
> 		[/LC]
> 
> 	or a combination?

I prefer [L], but for lengthy text chunks [LC] is good to.
At several place we'll need [msg] too.

> 
> Any other issues that are on peoples minds? I have tried very hard to
> give the tools for internationalization in Interchange, but obviously
> I am a monolingual American and often have blind spots. We need to think
> about things which will make the internationalization effort outstanding.

Yeah, this is a quite a mouthful :-)

Ciao
        Racke

-- 
Racke happily hacks Interchange and maintains Debian packages like Courier.

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