Re: Re: proposal for translated content projects

On Fri, 2003-11-14 at 23:11, Vincent Brabant wrote:
> > Here's some ideas, but they're just that - ideas.  Not
> > final, just proposals - please add your comments and
> > suggest alternatives if you have them.
> As you know, I will certainly post a long comment ;-)

:-)

> > It seems a bit hit and miss to offer the translated pages
> > that we have only "parallel" to their english versions,
> > buried deep in the site.  Sure, we have spanish, dutch,
> > french ... versions of /community/lists/index.html, but
> > what if a spanish speaker who doesn't speak english
> > lands on the site ?  
> Logically, a spanish speaker who doesn't speak english, use the spanish version of Google (http://www.google.es/)
> and will do a search of NetBeans with option 'páginas en español' that will give him in the two first links the pages of netbeans (www.netbeans.org/index_es.html and www.netbeans.org/community/contribute/index_es.html).

Good points ... but what about a search for non-translatable
words or phrases (as discussed just today on the list),
"IDE", Java, "open source" ... I still think it is possible
that someone can land on the site on an english page, 
wanting to know more but not able to navigate anywhere or
find anything they can read.

Even if they land on a translated page, in the current
set up most other pages in that language are not linked
from it.  So our visitor lands on spanish page A, but
what they really want is on spanish page B; there are
no links directly from A to B so they don't ever find B.
It's not nice to have to go back to google.es and do
a new search between each page ...

Or our visitor comes to NB, lands on 1 spanish page and
is very interested, and wants to learn *everything* they
can about NB, nb.org, etc etc.  How to (easily) do it ?

> > translated welcome page, but that doesn't link to any
> > other translated content on the site ...
> True, but on the main page, you can invite your guest to look at the map page, 
> to find all web pages having a spanish flag.

This would work ... but is not a *great* browsing
experience I think ... surely there is a better way ?

> > language, ISO.netbeans.org where ISO is the language code
> > as we have been using for html pages (fr, nl, es ...).
> Af first glance, it would be nice, but at second glance, it will be difficult.
> hereafter the reason why:
> 
> If we want a fr.netbeans.org site, having the same look and feel than the official one, 
> www.netbeans.org, we have to translate the pages appearing in the www site, with all texts, menu, and images wrapped around.
> And that added things are really painful to read when you have to translate a page.

I'm not sure I understand ... the ISO.nb.org sites 
would be just like current module sites.  Main tabs
would stay as they are (current infrastructure doesn't
allow for these to be easily translated ... maybe one
day).  But the rest is entirely up to the owner or
team.  They can customise and translated the left
navigation.  Content on the site is also entirely up
to the owner/team - what they chose to translate, 
even original localised content.  I think we should
have a minimu set of suggested docs to have there,
to explain the basics (like our current essential
docs), but other than that ... up to you/your team.

> Another problem, is that you have to change all the links to images or not yet already translated pages. So, no more possible to don't change the links. Because all links are relatives ones.

Well, yes that is true ... we could probably come up
with some perl or something to do this automatically
if it would help ...

> Another problem, is that it will be impossible to have a printable version of the translated document. (Now, it's not a problem, the translated files are also available in testwww, without any menu, header, ..., so have both the printable and displayable version of the document.

Also true, but the new SourceCast has some printing
fixes that will make any pages printable (css2 I
think, so older browsers wont support it).  So that
will be (soon ?) fixed.

> Personaly, I would like to continue as now. 
> Just do efforts to adapt scripts that have to wrap text with localized menus, and I will be glad.
> And maybe also construct a RSS for each language. It will permit to have RSS available in the other language than english one.

Interesting idea ... what about having it on fr.nb.org ? :-)



-- 
Jack Catchpoole
NetBeans/Sun Microsystems
http://www.netbeans.org/