[Localization] Spanish wiki page to lang-xx

Mon May 12 12:12:20 EDT 2008

Ed's bug report has been confirmed on FF3, but it does not occur with FF2.
Thanks to mchua for testing on FF2/Ubuntu and FF3/Ubuntu, I can also add
that it does not occur on IE7/Vista.

Furthermore, mchua confirms that commenting out arabic causes the problem to
go away in FF3.

In my opinion, this pretty much narrows this down to an issue with FF3
trying to do something clever on the span mouseover when it sees the R-to-L
script of Arabic as I had speculated earlier.  The easy work-around is to
leave R-to-L scripts out at this point in time, until more clarity can be
gained on whether this gets fixed in FF3.  Perhaps creating a second
template (or a second <span class> </span> statement on the same template)
would be suitable near-term workarounds.

Overall, my opinion is that the occurence of this issue only for FF3
beta-testers makes this something of a non-issue at this point in time.  It
might be nice for someone to communicate this back to mozilla community, but
I'm going to decline to carry that ball.  Ed, you're the FF3 beta-tester,
maybe you might do so.

I'd love to turn this wiki template idea over to someone who has good wiki
template-fu.  For instance, I don't know if this can be reduced to a single
template (with variable start lang) or if practically it needs to be
expanded into a suite of templates with fixed start langs.

If there is anyone else out there that thinks the idea of end-users (testers
at schools) being able to post to the wiki in their own language and get
useful info back to developers (mostly lang-en) with minimal language
barriers, please step up and chip in.  I know machine translation is
imperfect, but then again so are most messages to the "helpdesk" from
end-users.  I really think this would be a useful addition to overcoming
l10n barriers to feedback from deployments, as well as minimizing the l10n
barriers to local users harvesting information off of the mostly lang-en
wiki pages.  Human page translation efforts on wiki can be focused on truly
"important" pages and most of the rest can be made reasonably comprehensible
across language barriers by clicking a single link for a "good enough"
Google translation.

Thanks to morukai and mchua for testing.

On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 12:35 PM, Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Interesting. it's tests absolutely fine for me on Safari on OSX and
> Firefox 2.0.0.14 and IE7 on WinXP/SP2.  I don't have access to a config
> like your's right now and I haven't tested on my XO yet either.
>
> The template itself is surprisingly simple HTML See
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Template:Gttranslation_alt
>
> You can also compare it to the original I found which assumes lang-en as
> starting language on page.
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Template:GTranslations
>
> I modified it to assume lang-es as starting language.
>
> Just speculating, but perhaps it is the combination of the presence of
> Arabic (An R-to-L script) as the first entry on the list and the possibility
> that the beta-version of FF you're using is trying to do something clever
> (e.g. pre-interpret script direction on mouseover of span), but having
> unexpected consequences.
>
> One thing to test would be dropping Arabic out of the template as a first
> quick pass at narrowing it down.  Of course, it's always possible you have
> identified one of the reasons that FF3 is still beta and not production.
> Thanks for the testing.
>
> cjl
>   On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 5:04 AM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 12:58 AM, Chris Leonard
> > <cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > All,
> > >
> > > I'm experimenting with a really cool template that I found sitting
> > > more-or-less abandoned on the wiki. User:Katie had started it in Jan.
> >  It
> > > adds a Spanish to lang-xx translation quick-link to a lang-es wiki
> > page. As
> > > a test-case, I've added it to http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Lambayeque.
> > >
> > > This could useful, feel free to try the links on Lambayeque, but it's
> > highly
> > > experimental, so please don't replicate it around just yet.
> >
> > The resulting set of links is rendered unstably in Firefox 3 on
> > Ubuntu. When I point to any of the links, the order of the links
> > changes from RTL to LTR and back too rapidly to read. When I remove
> > the cursor from the line of links, it can remain rendered in either
> > order. The URL displayed in the status bar also flickers between two
> > different values. When I click in a particular location, I can get
> > either of two different translations at random.
> >
> > > The concept is
> > > generalizable, in fact, the original template is specific for lang-en,
> > I
> > > modified it for use on lang-es pages. Essentially a whole suite of
> > these can
> > > be created from lang-yy to langs -aa -bb -cc, etc, up to Google's
> > coverage
> > > limit.  These templates will have to be created and named
> > systematically,
> > > if/when it gets done.
> > >
> > > I saw a message on the devel thread where Spanish language feedback
> > (from
> > > Lambayeque) was not accessibe to the developer because of the language
> > > barrier.  It just goes to show  that l10n issues cut both ways.
> > >
> > > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Cjl
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Localization mailing list
> > > Localization at lists.laptop.org
> > > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/localization
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Edward Cherlin
> > End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
> > http://www.EarthTreasury.org/ <http://www.earthtreasury.org/>
> > "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay
> >
>
>
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