[Foundation-l] Re: Proposal for multilingual coordination on foundation website

[Anthere]

Nicolas Weeger a écrit:
> Hello.
> 
> Sorry if this has been discussed before, or the place would be better on 
> meta (in which case could someone post there and/or gimme the 
> appropriate url? :)
> 
> Here's a (rough) proposal for managing different language of pages, 
> heavily based on [[m:Translation requests]].
> 
> When someone creates a new page (not translate an existing one), s/he 
> creates two pages like that:
> * My page (title in original language)
> * My page/<language code>
> 
> In the first page, put link the 2nd, stating that's the original 
> language. Then fill in 2nd. Maybe put timestamps of last change on 1st 
> so easy to check when original changed.
> When someone translates ''My page'' to language xx, do translation in 
> [[My page/xx]], and link from [[My page]].
> 
> When writing another page that links to ''My page'', try to link to [[My 
> page/xx]]. If nothing, link to [[My page]] - it'll make people want to 
> translate ''My page'', and point the page does exist - though not (yet) 
> in language you'd want.
> 
> If you want to link to a page you know doesn't exist, just link to 
> [[Future page]], without /. This way, when [[Future page]] does get 
> created, ''what links here'' will tell us which links need to be fixed 
> to correct language.
> 
> I hope it's clear lol.
> 
> The benefits i see are:
> * when translating another document, easy to know which articles are 
> translations of articles - either [[link/<my language>]], and if red 
> [[link]] (assuming original link is not broken)
> * each page have a ''disambiguation''-like page, to link all versions 
> and not forget a page here & there :)
> * you won't have someone translate [[Board]] to [[Conseil 
> d'administration]] and someone else to [[Board/fr]], and thus don't need 
> to check broken links or duplicates and whatever
> * software could prolly (though developers will know better'an me ;p) be 
> tweaked to check for [[article/<browser language>]] when someone asks 
> for [[article]], and fallback on latter if not found - thus one day we 
> can link straight to [[article]]
> 
> On the bad side:
> * page title is always ''original language'' title, whatever the 
> language the page actually is
> 
> Nicolas 'Ryo'

Hmmm
Well, I think you are suggesting this by reference of the newsletter and 
the wikimedia site translation.
This could work for some translations I guess.

But I see two problems with this :

*the title being in original language is problematic. If the original 
language is in japanese, that means all I will see from this page title 
is ?????/fr.
I fear it is not very informative to me to help me guess what is on the 
page.

*at least on the wmf site, I can not really say which article is the 
original one. Languages are alternatively worked on.
Similarly, if I refer to the newsletter, though I wrote a big part of it 
in french, which was translated in english by someone else, the version 
of the newsletter considered original was the english one... even though 
the original text was french. When the english text was edited, I had to 
edit back the "original" text in french, so it could fit the english text.
After a while, this gets very confusing :-) This mix of origin does not 
goes much in the direction of having original and original/fr.

But for other situations (true translations), that might work yes.