Suggestions Related to Joomla! Philippines Localization Goals

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jlilio
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Suggestions Related to Joomla! Philippines Localization Goals

Post by jlilio » Mon Mar 06, 2006 1:44 am

What I see is that the Joomla! translation team's job is not limited to translating the core, components and modules into the Filipino language. With the integration of JoomFish into Joomla!, we can make the Joomla! Philippines site multi-lingual.. but of course as you already know, it requires manually translating the content (maybe written in English) into Filipino (or maybe other native languages as well). That feature will surely add to the appeal of the site... that at least is my opinion. I would also be very happy to see my Joomla! site(s) geared towards the local crowd patterned after that model, and so, starting with the Joomla! partner site (Philippines) is indeed the way to go.

What is not supported by MambelFish as of the present (I suppose... correct me if I am wrong) is to filter the content that can be shown on the front-end based on the language choice. Meaning, if I choose Filipino, then I would expect writeups written in that language only; or to make it more flexible, if I choose Cebuano and Filipino, then I get content for both. This requires some SQL filtering and coding, and sure can be a nice sub project for Joomla!.

This post spells out two points here: a) one is to make JoomFish a bit dynamic (for sorting and filtering content  based on language) and b) take this as a cue that we can move on towards translating into other Philippine languages NOT just Filipino. Joomla! Philippines therefore can be very unique in the sense that we are the only CMS that supports many native tongue.

Joomla! Philippines has every potential to be very unique for several things... and that includes our country's rich culture, heritage and we do have a diverse pool of languages.

God bless!


Julian
Last edited by jlilio on Mon Apr 10, 2006 6:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Suggestion on Joomla! Philippines MUlti-Lingual and Translation Goals

Post by Joomlasticman » Sat Apr 08, 2006 9:56 am

Fancy Schmancy!  ;)
Filipino Translation Coordinator for partner site – http://www.joomla.org.ph

"To see far is one thing: going there is another"
                                                      -- Brancusi

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Re: Suggestion on Joomla! Philippines MUlti-Lingual and Translation Goals

Post by stingrey » Sat Apr 08, 2006 3:12 pm

jlilio wrote: What is not supported by MambelFish as of the present (I suppose... correct me if I am wrong) is to filter the content that can be shown on the front-end based on the language choice. Meaning, if I choose Filipino, then I would expect writeups written in that language only; or to make it more flexible, if I choose Cebuano and Filipino, then I get content for both. This requires some SQL filtering and coding, and sure can be a nice sub project for Joomla!.
Actually the Joomfish (formerly Mambelfish) system is built so that it can autodetect the language settings of your system and attempt to load content for the language it detects.

Also what happens is that it attempts to load content for your specific language, however if it has content that does not contain a translation in the specifc language it will load the default original langauge content - which is usually english.
So for example if you have a site in english and german, with german as a default and someone visits the site in english it will load the english translated content.  However, if has a piece of content not translated in english, it will load the default german content.

The way Joomfish know whichs language to load,m is generally that the language type is added to the url in sef.php.
There may also be a cookie system which makes it more invisible, but not sure.

So basically from what I understand your requirements are already met by Joomfish/Mambelfish
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Re: Suggestion on Joomla! Philippines MUlti-Lingual and Translation Goals

Post by stingrey » Sat Apr 08, 2006 3:17 pm

jlilio wrote: take this as a cue that we can move on towards translating into other Philippine languages NOT just Filipino. Joomla! Philippines therefore can be very unique in the sense that we are the only CMS that supports many native tongue.
In instigating the creation of the Filipino Forum area and the Tagalog Translation Group, I always stated that I would love to see language packs in the other dialects of the Philippines.  I still would like to see this come to fruition.



However, for the time being I would like to see all efforts and resources concentrated on Taglog Translations.  Dividing energy and resources know runs the risk of getting many different translations efforts with none finished, rather than at least one translation effort fully completed.

Further as the Tagalog Translation Group is still in its early days of formation, there are many adminisitrative and structural issues that need to be addressed.  Once these are adequately addressed, starting other translation efforts will be much easier.
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Re: Suggestion on Joomla! Philippines MUlti-Lingual and Translation Goals

Post by jlilio » Sat Apr 08, 2006 7:47 pm

Rey, as for the fish, I still would want to see the content filtered by the language(s) selected. It wouldn't make sense, say, if one is not fluent (or comfortable) with English, and still see forced to view untranslated content that defaults to that language. For urbanized Filipinos, that wouldn't pose as a problem, as we do speak both English and Filipino... others I suppose are less fortunate. For other non-English speaking countries, the default behavior can be a serious flaw or maybe simply undesirable.

Not to worry... Alex has read some posts related to this (maybe not this one yet), and he mentioned something about a parameter that can be used to make this happen (in a similar discussion pertaining to filtering search results by language) with 1.1 (now 1.5).

---

Btw, It will be very nice to see all strings in 1.5 .ini to result into a 100% UI in the second language (assuming everything has been translated), and hopefully, that includes translation of all default/official components and modules in the release. As of 1.0.8, this is not true... one still gets texts prompts in English, which he/she has to answer in the other language (say, Filipino), or vice-versa.  :(

Julian

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Re: Suggestion on Joomla! Philippines MUlti-Lingual and Translation Goals

Post by stingrey » Sat Apr 08, 2006 7:58 pm

jlilio wrote: Btw, It will be very nice to see all strings in 1.5 .ini to result into a 100% UI in the second language (assuming everything has been translated), and hopefully, that includes translation of all default/official components and modules in the release. As of 1.0.8, this is not true... one still gets texts prompts in English, which he/she has to answer in the other language (say, Filipino), or vice-versa.  :(
This is/was one of the main goals of 1.5 and if you test 1.5 from SVN you will see that this has been 95+% accomplished.

The Beta test periods are where any remainding 'static' text that is non convertable are fixed.
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Re: Suggestion on Joomla! Philippines MUlti-Lingual and Translation Goals

Post by stingrey » Sat Apr 08, 2006 8:00 pm

jlilio wrote: Rey, as for the fish, I still would want to see the content filtered by the language(s) selected. It wouldn't make sense, say, if one is not fluent (or comfortable) with English, and still see forced to view untranslated content that defaults to that language.
I believe that the logic behind this decision was that, it woudl be better to see the original untranslated content, rather than no content - which is not always desireable.

But as you say Alex is aware of this issue.
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Re: Suggestions Related to Joomla! Philippines Localization Goals

Post by jlilio » Mon Apr 10, 2006 6:48 pm

A single word or even short phrases can create potential problems which cannot be remedied in a localization effort. I suggest this must be avoided when possible (except maybe nouns such as 'name', 'country', 'explanation', etc., etc. that can stand on their own).

As I was working on the Filipino translation of v1.5x, I came across "YOUR=Your" which is the last entry on the main .ini file (renamed fil-PH.ini).

This is problematic because the possessive pronoun/adjective "your" in Filipino lexicon, which is the modern "mo" is placed at the end of the noun not at the beginning of it. If at any point, the variable 'YOUR' is used anywhere by anybody, it will result into a wrong local rendition. For example, "your password" is correctly translated in Filipino today as "ang pasword mo". It can never be "ang mo password" or "mo password" as it will be simply incomprehensible. Therefore, if at any point, the string variable 'YOUR' is used anywhere (e.g. Joomla! core) by anybody, the translated entry may result into a wrong local rendition if we used "mo" as the translation for "your".

It's a good thing, we have "iyong" which can be placed before the noun (e.g., "Iyong pangalan", "Iyong pasword", etc.), but it's like we're back to the old abakada era. I'm almost sure others (using other languages) will also experience a similar problem.

If we can, please raise up this issue with the Joomla! internationalization team. Generally speaking, it has to be a rule of thumb that very short text descriptions are difficult to translate accurately, and therefore should be addressed by the developers (to be more translator-friendly) at the least.

Julian


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