Create webs for each translation of TWiki

The defacto approach for TranslationSupport, with regards to topics, in twiki is wrap them up in a tarball and attach them to a topic here in Codev, GermanTranslation for example. It would be in the TWikiCommunity's best interests if these nascent translation efforts were real live webs which could be updated in place like any other twiki topic. This will lower the barrier to participation and help these efforts to grow and survive, and hopefully thrive. If this is not done I fear all but the most highly motivated will lose interest, thus limiting TWiki as a whole.

-- MattWilkie - 06 Jan 2005

Translating webs this way is OK, but TranslationSupport really needs to also cover embedded English messages in the code (should be extracted, e.g. see CPAN:Locale::Maketext for a good CPAN module) and templates (similar issues).

Really this should be done via a combination of TWiki and SVN. There's some interesting work on translation portals at the moment, making it really easy to get software translated - see Google:ubuntu+rosetta for example, and https://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/SupportingTranslations - these aim to make it possible to translate software without knowing about PO files, SVN, and so on. TWiki's own web pages (with some TranslationSupport code e.g. to indicate language of a page) would be fine for TranslationSupport of the standard web text, but a translation portal might be a good idea for the other parts, to simplify life for translators, particularly those who are not very technical.

I'd like to redirect this discussion into TranslationSupport, as that aims to cover how we progress beyond the 'attach tarball' stage for creating and supporting translated versions of TWiki.

-- RichardDonkin - 07 Jan 2005

Darn fine idea, Matt. I can envisage translation webs becoming Contrib style optional downloads. I like the idea of an end user being able to download and one-touch install internationalisations.

I'm still not clear on where the master documentation really is; the TWiki web on TWiki.org is still nominally the master, but the SVN source is where DEVELOP changes are being made (we have to have the power of SVN to branch the docs).

-- CrawfordCurrie - 07 Jan 2005