Re: Translating the GNOME 2.12 release notes

[Tommi Vainikainen <tvainika niksula cs hut fi>]

On 2005-08-18T17:19:14+0300, murrayc murrayc com wrote:
> The release notes will be ready for translation on August 31st,
> giving you one week for translation before the release on September
> 7th.

I just wonder if any of you have heard about HTTP content negotiation?
Content negotiation is a way for the web browser to send accepted
languages in a HTTP request and get the best translation (according to
user's preferences) as return. For example Debian's website uses this
technique, and you can read more at
<URL: http://www.debian.org/intro/cn >

Of course there are some proxies et cetera in wild which have broken
support for this technique, and therefore sometimes at least Debian
gets feedback because of badly configured browsers or broken proxy
servers, but IMHO the technique works well.

As a translator this is interesting question for me because having a
link "http://www.gnome.org/start/2.12/notes/"; select language
automatically would increase visibility of translations as users no
longer need to manually select translation every time.

To use such technique, the pages need to be named in a way that HTTP
server's content negotiation module understands those to be same page,
and content negotiation module loaded -- that should be enough.

In Apache it would mean that when english page is notes/index.html,
then Finnish translation is index.fi.html (or index.html.fi depending
on some settings), and French translation is index.fr.html (or
index.html.fr). Then user accesses URL http://www.g.o/s/2.12/notes/ or
.../notes/index and gets version of the page according to his/her
browser settings. (Technically it sends Accept-Language header in HTTP
request.)

-- 
Tommi Vainikainen