0.9.5.1 Language Translation Kit

NOTE Split from the main 095 thread because I think we’ll likely wind up releasing 095 with a couple of base languages then follow up with a 0951 "international" release.

Quote from: rthrash at Nov 04, 2006, 08:19 AM

Attached is the translation "kit" ... Paul or anyone with experience in this area, can you take a peek at it to see what’s missing ... set locale and include the original English fallback stuff I suppose? Should probably also have a "How to translate MODx" with instructions on naming conventions, etc.

What’s Missing:
Quite the opposite, there are Mac and SVN files in there that need removing... I’ll post a tweaked .zip later.

Fallback:
Last time I checked, the Manager loads English and then the specified language (if it isn’t English) - meaning that any lines that are not set in the specified language, the definition from English will be used without us having to do anything.

This means that dialects like British English only need to redefine a few phrases. I assume there are other dialects of foreign languages which may wish to include French and then redefine those phrases that differ - so that’s something to put in the instructions.

Similarly, there probably needs to be some way of specifying which set of country names to use independently from the main language.

setlocale:
I knew very little about this; I’ve looked into it and there appear to be some issues. Locales appear to need to be installed, and they are known under different names on different systems. It is possible to specify a bunch of them for fallback (much like a font in CSS), but it would seem that there are two facts:
1) Users may not have the locale(s) specified by our language.
2) Users may have a locale available which does not have a corresponding MODx language.
Further, some of the settings (decimal separator, etc) may possibly conflict with the db.
So in essence I think I’d rather see this selectable independently of language, and probably selectable for each category (as at http://uk2.php.net/setlocale ) rather than LC_ALL.

How to translate
Naming convention has improved recently to the point where we can just say "replace ’english’ with the name of your language"; we do need to list which languages are being worked on (wiki?) and link to the other completed lang packs so that people can see an example of what to do.

Also need to look at the good catch from OncleBen: http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,8612.msg62027.html#msg62027 regarding weblogin stuff.

Also:
madmage says "readme in the root directory should be formatted using CR+LF (win style), just to make the life easier for newbies" - good point.

Dog has to "open the language file in a texteditor, save it as latin1 and upload it again everytime I do an update."

Obviously, if we drop German from the next release he won’t have that problem...

Seriously, it is probably best to encourage multiple formattings, like:

german-utf8
german-latin1

(?)

I just changed the files I could (some non-UTF8 character sets or R2L files I wasn’t comfortable touching) for the readmes and updated the language kit and instructions. Find it in tattoo-assets/distribution/ in SVN.