While considering what we can do to make translated
pages more accessible we
come up against the fact that by default page names remain in English, with
only the langcode appended. This makes things difficult for, for instance,
readers of Cyrillic or Chinese scripts.
[snip]
There is a further problem, though, if we wish to
avoid the
English+langcode
title. Some pages consist of only an application
name, which will not, of
course, be translated. At the moment we can't see any way other than using
the langcode to separate them. There is even the possiblity of other pages,
particularly in Scandinavian languages, having the same page-name, due to
similarities in the languages. This seems to open up a huge can of worms.
We had a brief moment of hope when we saw {{DISPLAYTITLE:DesiredTitle}}, but
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Page_name seems to say that it can't help
us.
Has anyone tackled these problems? Or does anyone have any ideas? Thanks
The
OpenOffice.org Wiki has a similar problem. For various reasons, we
opted a long time back to use a single namespace. To begin with, it
wasn't an issue.. pages were only in English. As the Wiki grew, the
various language communities started translating the Wiki pages. It
started really organically, and pages were a hodgepodge of whatever
looked right that day.
Recently (say in the last 18 months) we've started getting a handle on
it, and working to organize things.. basically facing what appears to be
the exact same issue you're dealing with.
The solution we came up with, is to use the ISO language code to
differentiate each language group. The ISO code is reasonably well
known and accepted... so this seems to work. We use interwiki links to
link up each language groups. The result looks something like this:
baseURL/ISO_Lang_code/subpage1/subpage2/etc.
For example the Doc Project has its main English entry point here:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation
the French one is here:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/FR/Documentation
and so on. We still have a lot of work to do to get all pages lining up
the same way, but this illustrates the "solution"
For specific content pages... say the Basic Guide, an English page is here:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/BASIC_Guide/Events
and the corresponding Italian page then would be here:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/IT/Documentation/BASIC_Guide/Events
Note that we use English for the URL and then {{DISPLAYTITLE:title}} to
localize the title shown on the pages.
Sometimes, where it makes sense, the page URL is also localized... for
example:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/How_Tos/Calc:_TODAY_…
and the Dutch translation:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/NL/Documentation/How_Tos/Calc:_fun…
which still follows the same general naming structure, but allows for a
language specific subpage.
It's an imperfect solution... but it's working.... the breadcrumbs work
correctly (keeping the reader withing the selected language group if
they use the breadcrumb links)... in most cases it's also quite easy to
discover the translated versions (if, say interwiki links haven't yet
been added) by simply prefixing the subpages in the URL with the ISO
language code. Like I said, we still have some tidying to do to make it
all consistent, but.. it's shaping up.
I'd also be interested in improvements in this idea...
C.
--
Clayton Cornell ccornell(a)openoffice.org
OpenOffice.org Documentation Project co-lead
Sun Microsystems, Hamburg, Germany