Internationalization of documentation

[robe]

Given that native English speaking folk (at least on core dev team) are outnumbered by our French, Italian Spanish, Swedish com padres, it does seem that our documentation should reflect that.

Not quite sure where to start though -- any thoughts? I know when Paul was over visiting he seemed a bit disappointed we didn't have Japanese documentation.

Olivier had started doing some work to prepare for internationalization by splitting the documentation up so it would be easier to translate.

[nicklas]

Hallo

I am not really sure what I think about translating to a small language like Swedish. It would of course be very nice to make it more easy to start using PostGIS. But at the other hand I have started myself to never install anything in swedish on my computer for one reason. If I get all messages and menues in english it is much easier to get help from a google search. The Swedish error message or menu item can not be found at google, or at least far from that amount of similar situations as my own that you always find if you search in English.

Even if it is more to find in French and so on English is still the major language in those situations.

I think that my suggestion is that we pick the most basic parts of the documentation and makes that international. If we could have the possibility to change language for each page in the online version it would be great because then it is possible to get a part in English if needed.

One thing to decide is also if the translations is a part of the releases. If the translations have to be ready before release. I think they should, because because otherwise we risk that you anyway have to go to the English doc to get the up to date information. It is better to translate a small relevant part of the documentation and keep it up to date than translating everything and get 3 releases behind.

/Nicklas

[robe]

Nicklas,

That's interesting. I've personally found google translate useful for reading blogs written in other languages from author's I'm interested in. It reads a little funny but still understandable.

So would a first stab be good enough to simply put a google translate toggle on the documentation (each page)? Just for ease of use for people so they don't have to do it themselves. I think that we can probably do without too much trouble by changing the doc html template or putting a frame around things.

[robe]

Okay I guess now that we've started this it's no longer a future prospect.

I have Debbie building the Italian documentation as part of 2.1 doc build

 http://www.postgis.org/documentation/manual-svn/postgis-it.html

Just let me know when we are ready to add more languages.

[robe]

Investigate setting up a Pootle server site similar to what QGIS uses. I may need to break this out as a separate ticket

 http://translate.qgis.org/

[robe]

Please refer to #2212 .

I'm closing this one out since Sandro already setup our infrastructure to support translation and all is left is users ready to translate and also an easy to use infrastructure like Pootle for allowing users without commit access to do so.