Bryce Harrington wrote:
Hi all,
pistoncito asked about how to do translations of the website currently. I figure this suggests we need some sort of documentation, so here's a start. It sounds like we will need to change this process once we figure out how to do the automatic web browser language detection, but until that gets sorted out, we should use this process. I'll also post this to Wiki so folks can update it as better approaches are worked out for it.
http://wiki.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WebsiteEditing
I see here a problem on how the translated pages will be kept up to date with the original ones. The website is live, it can be changed anytime by a lot of people, is very hard for translators to monitor such changes (especially is the changes are minor, like adding a screenshot) and also hard to manually find the modified section and add/update the translation for it.
As Alexandre said, using gettext is a better solution for maintaining translations for the website, but the effort to implement it is big enough and I doubt is worth it.
Personally, if I had to choose between an up to date English website and an old and dusty translation in my native language I would not hesitate one second and use the English one. This is why I don't think browser language detection and automatic redirection is a good idea at all if we are not sure the translated websites are complete and up to date.
note: take this with a grain of salt, I am not a big fan of translations, even change the Google page from Romanian (I guess it detect my geographic location based on IP) back to English