[Chameleon] Several questions

[Arnulf Christl]

Paul Spencer wrote:
[...]
> Speaking of which, I am not happy with how translations are currently 
> working, it is too hard to maintain.  I am trying to come up with a 
> better way ...

Hi Paul,
we have a similar problem at hand. Mapbender 1.4 had a separate file 
with texts and tooltips for each language, easy and simple. We dropped 
this out of several reasons when we redesigned Mapbender to be more 
generic. Now we simply copy and translate each GUI individually. Thats 
OK as long as you don not change GUI elements frequently.
Drawbacks:
- You cannot switch language once you are into the map, except you would 
want to leave the client with one Context Document, jump into a fresh 
GUI with the selected language and dump the Context Document.
- Every mew module has to be inserted into every GUI manually.
- Translation is somewhat tedious as you have to select the text strings 
with SQL from the database, translate them and store them back to 
another GUI. But that should be OK for most people if it is documented well.

The problem goes a lot deeper though, as the data in the map should also 
switch language and that really means to multiply all alphanuerical data 
by the count of laguages to support. There are not many multilingual WMS 
around that i now of.

If you have any ideas on how to adress these questions we are very 
interested in sharing.

Best,

-- 
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Arnulf B. Christl
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http://www.ccgis.org
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