Multilingual Metadata

Dear Plone Collective Members,

I have built a Zope/CMF site to support a mixed-language teaching and
administrative environment in my University faculty.  The approach differs in
some respects from the mainstream, and if anyone in the Collective is
interested, I would be happy to work up a bundle to use as a base for further
development or experimentation.

In essence, we have chosen to divide the translation processes associated with
our content into three layers, rather than the customary two:

  * Fixed menu items
  
  * Metadata (title, description)
  
  * Text content

Menu items can be covered by the existing *.po export/import cycle.  However,
our site design uses object metadata to generate tabs and abstracts on the
fly. This information changes frequently, we want it to be available in
translation, and the *.po file export/import cycle is too cumbersome to keep
up.

To address this, I modified MessageCatalog from Localizer to place a
date-stamp on individual catalog entries.  This is then leveraged to implement
online catalog maintenance by selected members of our community, via personal
worklists.  The update process is centerless -- anyone can propose a
modification by changing the text for their language, and touching the date
stamp for their entry; it then populates to the worklists of other
translators.  So far, this process seems to be working out pretty well.

The site can be viewed at:

  http://bennettweb.nomolog.nagoya-u.ac.jp/jp/

I've also modified ZCTextIndex, so that the multilingual metadata for an
object gets slurped into SearchableText when objects are indexed. No
modification of objects themselves is required in order to get them to go
multilingual; the magic is all in ZCTextIndex and in page templates.

I don't have the energy to lobby actively for changes to Zope or to CMF/Plone,
but if our strategy looks attractive, I will be happy to supply our code and
help pursue this within Plone.

-- 
Frank Bennett
  http://bennettweb.nomolog.nagoya-u.ac.jp/jp/


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