Re: [Plone-developers] LinguaPlone : permitting users not to select a language before translating

On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 10:03 AM, robert rottermann <[email protected]> wrote:
> I have only now subscribed to to i18n discussion list. so I might raise
> things that have discussed before.

Please don't cross-post to the plone-dev mailing list, now that the
thread is at the right place.

> To my mind the fact that an object can not be language neutral to be
> translated is a fundamental flaw in LinguaPlone.

Support for neutral content in LinguaPlone has never been good and has
gotten worse over time. That's based on all the customer feedback and
experience we got at Jarn for building multilingual web sites over the
years, where we tried to make LinguaPlone better at handling the
customer requirements we got.

If you follow the W3C classification of websites [1] LinguaPlone only
really helps you at the "Multilingual, same content" use-case. If you
want to build a site with "Multilingual, changed content" you can
basically only use the language selector from LinguaPlone but none of
your content will have helpful "translation of" references, as you'll
have different content structures in different languages.

The support for neutral content at this stage is basically limited to
having central repositories at the root for assets like an image
repository.

I've seen people trying to build sites with LinguaPlone which have
some sort of half-translated state and fallback to different languages
all over the site. I haven't seen any approach to this which lead to a
good user experience while browsing or editing the site.

I'd love to hear how people approached these types of sites and if
someone was able to come up with a non-confusing way to structure
them. So far I only heard complaints about technical details in some
code, but no concept or reasoning behind those.

Cheers,
Hanno

[1] http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-mono-multilingual.en.php

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