Today i was thinking of how we internationalize (i18n) and localization (l10n) of wiki's. With docs.indymedia.org a twiki based system we've only had hap-hazard success. We've got the FAQ in many languages, and a few other random pages. The introduction page for docs.indy is in english, spanish, and catalan. The overview of how indymedia functions and documents specifically related to IMC's joining the indymedia network also have been translated in to many languages.
What hasn't happened is any kind of coherent navigation scheme for the site beyond what is in english. Lots of little sections are in different languages, but because there is neither practice nor tech to support the continued translation and updating of parallel versions of page in different languages the translations don't happen. We also don't have any structure to encourage more translations of pages throughout the site.
There are two kinds of i18n and l10n which need to happen. The first is easy conceptually. Adding support for utf-8 to the wiki and wiki words. We had to upgrade twiki for support of arabic, chinese, and korean. We could add the navigation in those languages, and should. That is just a matter of following traditional i18n / l10n techniques for software.
The real trick is when we try to look at how the wiki content and pages will be maintained across the languages. A single web page should be able to exist in multiple languages. The user should get the language they know (as defined in their browser) when they look at a page. They should also easily be able to switch to view the page in other languages. The debian website does all this nicely. They do it with a fairly big translation team and a static non-wiki like publishing system. Wiki's are supposed to be quick, easy, and simple. Most i18n projects end up being cumbersome and clunky.
So what we want, is the ability to connect different versions of a page. When you look at a page, there is a list of links to see this page in other languages. When the user clicks on a wiki link, it takes them to a version of that page while maintaining the language. One good way of doing this would be to pre-pend or append something like WikiWord.Langauge. This is the direction that pmwiki is going with it's i18n work. It's a good idea, and it's definitely the best internationalized wiki i've seen. The problem is that it doesn't maintain the cross linking beyond the home page. I'd imagine that's fixable without too much work.
The other problem is that the IntroductionPage is PaginaDeIntroduccion in spanish. This means we couldn't use IntroductionPage.spanish and IntroductionPage.english without the site having a dominate language and everybody else being forced to conform. The learn enough english to conform is politically acceptable in free software circles, but it's something we'd like to reject on principle in indymedia. We're just a long ways from shedding our english-centric-ness.
I'm not sure what the solution is.
Perhaps using something similar to back links, we could have horizontal links, to other pages in parallel languages. So you could show on a given wiki page, which other languages the page is available in and ask the to translate them. Then a wiki page would have to have another field beyond edit, it would need a place to enter in the sibling page.
Then we have the problem of versions, we'd need to indicate that new information was added to the sibling version of a page in another language.
I think a few examples we could pull on are the way www.indymedia.org (using mir) has been letting people open publish their own translations for articles. Another way we've been requesting translations of documents, both news and internal communication, is the translations.indymedia.org which works pretty well but has a terrible interface and design. It doesn't follow the wiki philosophy at all either.
Anybody else find good, or any, examples of people maintaining wiki's cross languages?
Did you look at Wikipedia?
Posted by: Seb at September 22, 2004 02:30 PM