[interchange-i18n] Internationalizing Foundation

Mike Heins mheins at redhat.com
Fri Aug 31 09:58:01 UTC 2001


Dear All,

We will be starting the internationalization effort on Foundation 
in a few days.

Obviously, we will need help with translation, but we also have
quite a few issues to decide.

    1. Internationalized pages -- should we start fresh and have a
       pages_i18n directory in addition to the default US-centric
       pages? How about templates/regions and templates/components?

    2. Product database structure. There are several options:

       a. One big table with new columns description_de,
	  description_nl, etc. This is my least favorite.

       b. Separate tables for each language, with empty fields falling
	  through to the default products. Basically, this means

	    Locale de_DE ProductFiles products_de products Locale
	    nl_NL ProductFiles products_nl products

	  etc.

       c. Separate tables *not in ProductFiles* with product
	  description information.

       There may be more that others can think of.

    3. Pricing -- should we provide easily selectable ability to
       maintain separate prices for each currency or should we
       concentrate on PriceDivide.

    4. Checkout forms -- should we build a different form for each
       locality, or try and do one big form?

    5. Text messages -- should we use

		[L CODE]The text.[/L]
	 or
		[L]The text.[/L]
	 or
		[LC]
			The text.
			[de_DE] Der text [/de_DE]
			[es_ES] El texto [/es_ES]
		[/LC]

	or a combination?

Any other issues that are on peoples minds? I have tried very hard to
give the tools for internationalization in Interchange, but obviously
I am a monolingual American and often have blind spots. We need to think
about things which will make the internationalization effort outstanding.

In particular, if you have experience with the successes and failures of
other programs and what we might do to emulate or avoid those, it would
be very helpful.

Best,
Mike 
-- 
Red Hat, Inc., 3005 Nichols Rd., Hamilton, OH  45013
phone +1.513.523.7621      <mheins at redhat.com>

Just because something is obviously happening doesn't mean something
obvious is happening. --Larry Wall



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