Ideas for managing content translation

[Jesse_Stratford]

Hey all,

Since this isn't a coding question I thought I'd post it here. I run ActionScript.org and we have a large number of quite lengthy tutorials about Flash ActionScript. Most of them have been written in English by myself or other native English speakers but a large percentage of our users are non-English speakers. We have no shortage of volunteers to help with translations of content, the problem is finding some sort of dynamic system to manage the translation.
Ideally we're after some kind of content management system which is compatible with multiple languages, including those that use right-to-left style writing and non-English characters. In addition it needs to support templates and limitations on users so that each user can be allocated a different tutorial to translate and cannot edit an article allocated to another user.
Finally it should be cheap - free ideally but I know that might not be possible.

I figured I'd try and harness the existing knowledge-base of users here to determine if such a system exists as lots of searching of SourceForge has turned up only PostNUke clones and I'm not tusre that they are suitable.

Any help (at all) much appreciated

Cheers

Jesse

[iceiceboom]

Hello,

Well, getting one of us to write you such a script would obviously not be free unless we did something extremely simple like I am going to do. Let me know if you want a full-featured content translation system.

What you would need to do is either set a cookie or pass through the URL the user's language which they could define on a page of your website.
On each page, it would do something like this:

<?php
$translation = $HTTP_COOKIE_VARS["translation"];
$filename = "myfile_$translation.inc.php"
require $filename;
?>

I am posting this presuming you are not new to PHP as this is not in the Newbie forum.

[Jesse_Stratford]

Thanks for the comments. You are correct in your assumption; I'm not new to PHP. I'm not really looking to get someone to create such a system for me, I'm more interested in hearing if anyone here knows of an existing system. Failing that I guess I'll make one myself.

Cheers

Jesse

[cyberlew15]

Hello I think the best way to implement such a language in a script is to create all of the languages in a page variable for example

<?php
// if a specific language code is entered then show the page
//in that language get url from either http_referer exploded into
//an array with the $pagename being the last entry
if (isset($GET['lang'] )) && (isset($HTTP_REFERER)){
$lang = $GET['lang'] ;
include ("./pagesdirectory" . $lang . "/" . $pagename);
}
else{
include (./pagesdirectory/defaultlang/" . $pagename);
}
?>

or else you could explode the text into a string and have a dictyionary file which sorts all words such as "yes" into lets say the hungarian version of the word which would be "igen"

note: the second method is very brute force I know but it saves time on admin work afterwords.

This has inspired me to start making two working models of both in a week I will have both done please e-mail me if you are still interested

[alvinkoh]

If the page contents are mostly complicated codes interweaved with foreign language, I would most certainly make use of different folders for different tutorials.

/Tutorial1/lang/en/index.php
/Tutorial1/lang/de/index.php

I find consistency to be very important in such cases to get a solid multi-language system up and running. One way to get the the universal language codes?.. e.g. en/de/cn/etc so that the system is robust enough for future upgrades.

You will probably need an administration interface to add new languages (database driven), manage the articles and to shift/rename the tutorial folders perhaps? Or a menu to indicate/store the number of languages that each tutorial would support?

e.g.

Language Administration

en -> English
de -> German
cn -> Chinese, etc

Overview Administration

Tutorial1 -> Supported languages (en,de) [Manage]
Tutorial2 -> Supported languages (cn) [Manage]

Tutorial Administration

Tutorial Name: Tutorial Lesson 1
etc.

The challenge of a multi-language site is high, to maintain it, probably even more difficult. :eek: A good base would certainly help alot!

I'm currently attempting to build a Hybrid language site. It contains 2 different styles of language management.

1) Using language folders. (similiar to above)
2) Using database-driven words/phrases.

The second method entails adding a new "phrase", e.g. "hello" into the database. I will have a menu that requires me to enter the translated word for other languages as well (e.g. chinese, german).

To fetch the phrases, I created a Language class which will fetch the required values based on the phrase.

Something like:

$myLanuage->setLanguage("de"); // Set to german
//.... (more code) ...
echo $myLanguage->parse("hello"); 

If it manages to get a match, it returns the translated word (& caches the word as well in a cache array of the Language class, in case the word appears many times on the same page).

The helpful part is IF it doesn't find a match, I can make the object return a generic message (e.g. "hello", or some warning message "hello" phrase cannot be found) This way, in the event that I add a new phrase, but didn't enter the correct translated description, I would see a warning on the output.

P.S. I'm picking up ActionScripting!

Cheers,
Alvin.