Multi-language support in the wiki

[Paul Baranowski <paul@…>]

Let trac be the first-ever multi-lingual wiki on the market! Have the ability to translate wiki articles into different languages. A user can select their language when they view the wiki. We have looked around and there isnt a wiki out there that handles this. And if you dont have time to do it, do you mind having some volunteers help you out? :)

[timonator@…]

the wikipedia has a multilanguage feature. every article has a little box on the left side that shows what other languages have this article. i dont know if this is a feature of the  MediaWiki, tho...

[stephane]

You could check:

 http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/MultipleLanguagesSupport

but I don't know if its what you want

[stephane]

See also:

 http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/FeatureRequests/ThisPageInOtherLanguages

PS: MoinMoin is also python based :-)

[anonymous]

maybe this helps the case, tikiwiki also has this feature. please also introduce it in trac.

[cboos]

#5238 was marked as duplicate.

There's also been a very interesting proposal by Shun-Ichi Goto, in  googlegroups:trac-dev:ab6aa7900a471742 and  TH:TracWikiNegotiatorPlugin.

[Stephan]

The multi-language feature shouldn´t be limited to the proposals above but should be extended to trac setup, too. Any text showing up in trac (e.g. the context navigation bar, search, "attach file", "edit this page" button) should be changeable. E.g., in trac.ini an entry languagefile=... could be added which points to a file trac_de.ini. This file enlists all text labels used in trac which can be adjusted according to the desired language.

Currently I can only adjust the mainnav and metanav bars. Having German header, footer, content and navigation bars mixed with English context navigation bar and button labels isn´t a maximal sophisticated feature ;)

[jruigrok]

Under source:sandbox/i18n there is already an effort underway to do translation of Trac's strings, so that the main UI is localized. For this we make use of  Babel to handle the i18n parts.

For the translation of Wiki pages and how to handle such things for projects of our users I am still tossing around some ideas to properly facilitate this.

Right now my primary goal is getting the message catalogs filled so that the UI is localized as much as possible. We will get there, one step at a time.

[jruigrok]

Part, if not all, of this problem can be solved with the newhelp system.

See TracDev/Proposals/NewHelp.

[cboos]

Milestone 2.0 deleted

[stoecker]

Regarding wiki translations: josm.openstreetmap.de uses translated wiki pages for some time now.

JOSM uses a [[TranslatedPages]] macro, which creates the language selection box and a wiki page  http://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/TracLanguages containing the information about available languages.

Translated webpage get a "code:" prefix before the name (i.e. directly after "wiki/" even for pages containing longer path)

•  http://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/StartupPage gets
•  http://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/De:StartupPage or
•  http://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Zh_TW:StartupPage

Language code is:

• First char uppercase, second lowercase
• subcodes are added in uppercase with "_" as separation

This method is consistent with other wikis, can be addressed easily from other resources (used as JOSM online help), the page index is grouped by language and users accepted and understood that system fine.

It would be fine when Trac would support this internal (especially regarding the new 0.12 feature to show the clickable path of a wiki page).

[stoecker]

One additional suggestion: For translated pages it is a common problem to keep original and translation in sync. Usually is the english page the base and others are translated. To help here trac could support translation efforts like this:

• define one page/language as base
• Allow to define a version of the base page as "complete" or ok. This means this version is completely represented in current page.
• Display the change differences beween the complete page und the current revision below the translation page currently edited.

This would allow to see changes in the base page in the edit section of a wiki page and thus improve the translations and the update rate. Also this information could be use in the index to show pages which are not up-to-date.

Maybe the concept of base pages could be used for other things as well, not only for translations.

For JOSM we use a different concept where all languages are in one page:  http://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/StartupPageSource This works, but is rather suboptimal. Integrated support would be much better.

[cboos]

Interesting ideas.