Re: [Templates] internationalization support (i18n)

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On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 10:14:58PM +0200, Daniel Schmeck said:
> I use the template toolkit for generating static html pages. At the
> moment are all templates with german content.

At Yahoo! we used a combination of run time templates and bake time 
internationalisation. Words or phrases to be internationalised were 
written like

	!!this phrase should be turned into the local language!!

and then at bake time these were translated (or left in place, minus the 
double bangs if no translation was available). 

The nice thing about it was that it was very simple and was also easy to 
see which phrases had been translated already for which langauges (I was 
routinely dealing with 9 languages simultaneously). It also let the 
local producers do some customisation by doing things like

	<img src="!!local flag image url!!" />

One things I did come across was that some phrases in, say, French, are 
completely different depending on whether the condition is singular or 
plural (in the case I'm remmebering it was number of pages of search 
results). That takes a bit of finessing with resepct to il8n techniques.

I did build a prototype replacement bake time system in TT and tried a 
variety of methods to replicate this functionality including setting !! 
as TT tags and then running two different parsers over the page and also 
filters (I think I hacked things so that stuff was autofiltered) - there 
was no clear advantage or disadvantage for any technique.


Simon



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