[FM Discuss] Translations

[Daniel James]

Hi Adam,

> Really nice you are offering to help with this
> stuff

You're welcome :-) I have ideas for the graphics, see below...

> We have had the idea from the beginning that we will not start new
> language portals unless there is someone to manage them.

That's very reasonable. Sourcefabric has staff speaking many languages -
including Russian, Spanish, and Greek - that could help with that.

> If you know any php people that
> can help with this I would be eternally grateful. If we could get 1 day
> or 2 with a good php programmer we could move ahead fast on the stuff
> you and Ed need.

I'll ask at Sourcefabric about that too.

> thanks for the heads up about the link. Will fix it.

I suggest the permanent solution is rather than using individual
imagemaps, to include one 'menu bar' on all user-facing pages with
context-sensitive buttons for the different languages. So if I'm an
Arabic speaker who has followed a link to the English manual on
bypassing censorship, the Arabic button will be 'lit up' in such a way
that indicates a translation is available, and I can switch to Arabic
with one click.

In the event that a translation for a particular manual doesn't exist
yet, the link can go to a page in Arabic saying that translators are
welcome, how to contribute etc. I think you'll soon get more
translations started.

Also, rather than using the ISO language codes in the button graphic,
which are probably not familiar to non-geeks, we could use the name of
that language in the native character set.

The list of languages I'm aware of on FM is:

ar
el
en
es
fa
fi
fr
hi
id
nl
ru
zh

If there any others, please let me know. German, Italian and Portuguese
(for Brazil) would be good to have. Whatever scheme we come up with will
have to be extensible, of course.

Cheers!

Daniel