non-Western-language content management
Hassan Schroeder
My experience so far has been one small static site in English which
I'd redesigned and then added a parallel Spanish version. Nothing
fancy on the backend as the site was on a cheap low-featured host;
language selection was just a button below the menu allowing the
viewer to toggle between languages from any given page. It did what
the client needed, so he was happy.
However, I recently took over hosting a non-profit's site which has
English and Japanese sections, currently entirely different content
(for different audiences). The long-term goal is to have at least a
part of the content available in English and Japanese. And that will
be the more frequently updated sections.
Data integrity will be pretty key. I don't speak Spanish, but it's
close enough to English to tell if a chunk of text got truncated or
something. There's no way I can tell (now) if some Japanese text is
right or not.
My basic platform is Tomcat, so ResourceBundles are an option for
short, relatively static stuff like menu text. For other content
text, I could use collections of flat files, XML, or MySQL. And of
course, there has to be an appropriate data entry system to go with
whichever.
So I'm interested in any content management tips oriented to multi-
and especially non-ISO-8859-*-encoded languages...
--
Hassan Schroeder ----------------------------- has...@webtuitive.com
Webtuitive Design === (+1) 408-938-0567 === http://webtuitive.com
dream. code.
coldfusionpaul
with umpteen codepage encodings (especially as you can find more than
one encoding for some languages, like the boatload thats grown up
around CJK). which kind of leaves msql out until they get real unicode
support going (i think you can stuff utf-8 in it but can't sort & maybe
can't search properly).
the xml idea is kind of appealing but i have issues with humans writing
out proper xml, so i guess you'd need decent tools to handle this part
of development. and since managing translations is such a huge pain (we
normally use ibm's rbManager for rb, its saved us on numerous
occasions), so i guess that would have to a part of these xml tools. do
you know of any?
btw i do i18n work using coldfusion, just so you know my bias, etc.
Hassan Schroeder
> well i'd suggest standardizing on unicode rather than mucking about
> with umpteen codepage encodings (especially as you can find more than
> one encoding for some languages, like the boatload thats grown up
> around CJK). which kind of leaves msql out until they get real unicode
> support going (i think you can stuff utf-8 in it but can't sort & maybe
> can't search properly).
Actually MySQL 4.1.x supports UTF-8, and the 4.1.2 release, which
is supposed to be production-stable, is due out shortly. Still, for
my immediate application, sorting and searching aren't critical.
> the xml idea is kind of appealing but i have issues with humans writing
> out proper xml, so i guess you'd need decent tools to handle this part
> of development. and since managing translations is such a huge pain (we
> normally use ibm's rbManager for rb, its saved us on numerous
> occasions), so i guess that would have to a part of these xml tools. do
> you know of any?
Nope :-) that's one reason I joined the list. Thanks for the mention
of rbManager. Is there anyone collecting links to tools like this
into a public resource list? Maybe a wiki?
Philip Trauring
There is an XML localization interchange format call XLIFF
(http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/xliff/documents/xliff-
specification.htm). There is further information at
http://www.xliff.org/.
I know of one commercial tool for editing XLIFF files - Heartsome's
XLIFF Translation Editor (http://www.heartsome.net/EN/xlfdown.html). It
runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
Philip
Paul Hastings
yes but not unicode, its not ready for primetime yet. mysql causes
quite a few i18n headaches (at least from what i've seen in the cf
community).
> my immediate application, sorting and searching aren't critical.
that can't last.
> Nope :-) that's one reason I joined the list. Thanks for the mention
> of rbManager. Is there anyone collecting links to tools like this
> into a public resource list? Maybe a wiki?
no idea but i know about these:
general i18n stuff
http://www.i18ngurus.com/
http://www.i18nguy.com/
http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu4j/
rb stuff
http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu4j/demo_tools/RBManager.html
http://www.cantamen.com/i18nedit.php
http://www.zaval.org/products/index.html
and i often drone on about such things:
http://www.sustainablegis.com/blog/cfg11n/index.cfm