Transcript Translating Drupal Websites Sean Burlington Quick run through www.PracticalWeb.co.uk

Translating Drupal Websites
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Sean Burlington
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www.PracticalWeb.co.uk
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Quick run through
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Translation generally
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Lessons learned
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Drupal specifics
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String translation
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Page translation
A long Time ago ...
Nictotinell.com
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Project developed in custom PHP
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Design first
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Then functionality
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Lastly translation
What I learned then
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Norwegian words are really long..
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Text gifs, layout tables, and translations !@#!*
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Don't take shortcuts
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Good Practice pays off
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Balance the tags in every template
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Don't let translation be an afterthought
Still before Drupal
How it worked
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Custom “CMS”
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2 languages English/Welsh
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script.aculo.us
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In place editing
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Suprising how may 'odd' pages crop up
www.useyourpaths.info
Complex Pages
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Long forms
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Lots of little bits of text
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The in-place editing really helped for long forms
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No support calls :-)
Drupal
(version 5)
Manage Strings
Locale Module (core)
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Enhances the t function
Make sure everyone reads
http://api.drupal.org/api/function/t/5
Choose a standard
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Does it include trailing spaces?
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What about punctuation?
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Avoid t($text) – use t('literal text')
format_plural()
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1 item – 2 items
format_plural($feed->items,
'1 item', '@count items')
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Calls t() internally
Problems with Manage Strings
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Strings originally in code – but translated from
database
String only available for translation after it has
been displayed
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Hard to find strings
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What about error messages
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How do you know when you're finished
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How to test a translation
Solution
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Potx – extracts strings from t functions
Allows you to select by module
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http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/toolkit/csv2po
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But this gives admin and public text together
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We wrote an upload languages module
(I'm trying to GPL this)
This takes a CSV of all languages – and returns
a merged CSV including any new translations
Useful for deployment
Localizer Module
Lots of options
Localizernode
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Works with custom node types
Just implement the usual hooks
(_insert, _update, _delete)
Creates a “Translation set” of nodes from the
original node
Translations tab
What it does
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Creates new nodes that are translations of
existing ones
Maintains a lookup table
Automatically displays the users preferred
translation
It works nicely
But – we had nodes that referred to other nodes
on another site via a CCK field and SOAP ...
Make sure everyone knows about the lookup
table at an early stage !
In General
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Plan
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Check your design
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Introduce standards early
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Test dummy translations early
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Translate late