Marking up translations

by **yecril71pl** » Sat Jul 25, 2009 1:47 pm

I can use

Code: Select all: <LINK REL=ALTERNATE LANG=OTHER >

to mark up a translation of the current document.
Q: How do I mark up a reference with a set of translations? :?:

Code: Select all:

does not seem to be a solution because it AFAICT it means that the referred document is a translation to the current document.
The obvious solution to put the set of links into the related document does not fly; the reader will not be happy to have to download the document in language A in order to get at the translation into language B.
Besides, in my case, the documents are in TIFF format, so they really cannot contain any references (except for what already is there, in that translations contain reverse references to the original, which is not what I need).
:idea:

One solution I have been able to come up with is to tag all the references with the same class:

Code: Select all: <A CLASS="ref1-translation" HREFLANG=%LANG% >

This, however, still does not tell the reader which document is the original, and a possible remedy

Code: Select all: <A CLASS="ref1-translation original" HREFLANG=%LANG% >

seems rather weird.

What do you think?
Thanks in advance,
Chris

by **zcorpan** » Mon Jul 27, 2009 12:14 pm

I think that you should communicate with the reader in natural language instead of trying to shoe-horn the semantics in markup. Whether to read the original or one of the translations is a choice the user will make anyway -- not the browser.

If you want to guess the user's preferred translated version, you can have one URL and inspect the browser's Accept-Language header, the browser's UI language, the OS's UI language, and/or the user's geographical location, and so forth.

by **yecril71pl** » Mon Jul 27, 2009 11:11 pm

This is all wise and proper — but
:?:

what if I also want to hide translations into Hungarian from the reader who does not know any Hungarian, except when the original is in Hungarian and there is no translation available?
:?:

Or if I want the user to be able to say "Give me this document and all translations in a batch!"
And I would rather have this information inside the HTML document than in an external resource.

by **zcorpan** » Thu Sep 17, 2009 7:43 am

yecril71pl wrote:This is all wise and proper ï¿½ but
what if I also want to hide translations into Hungarian from the reader who does not know any Hungarian, except when the original is in Hungarian and there is no translation available?

How can you know whether the user knows any Hungarian?

yecril71pl wrote: Or if I want the user to be able to say "Give me this document and all translations in a batch!"
And I would rather have this information inside the HTML document than in an external resource.

Not sure what you want to do. You could have a list of links to all the translations in your HTML document.

by **yecril71pl** » Fri Sep 25, 2009 11:07 pm

zcorpan wrote:How can you know whether the user knows any Hungarian?

Source of information:

Request headers,
User profile.

zcorpan wrote:Not sure what you want to do. You could have a list of links to all the translations in your HTML document.

Someting like this?

Code: Select all: <span class="multiref" > <a type="image/tiff" href="doc.en.tiff" hreflang="en" class="original" >document</a > (<a type="image/tiff" href="doc.hu.tiff" hreflang="hu" class="translation" ><img src="/flags/hu.png" alt="Magyar" /></a >)</span >

This works if all translations of the same document can be grouped, this is fortunately my case. Thanks.

(In case you wonder how this solves my problem, this code serves a double duty: it provides the default presentation and a data source for less usual requests.)

by **Guillo** » Fri Jan 07, 2011 3:11 pm

What does marking up the translation mean, exactly?
I'm trying to get a new page up for a English to Spanish Translation service that we provide, but including a lot of online features that the old one doesn't have (like demos for clients and a few interactive resources for translatiors).
Our webmaster was talking about what we could do using HTML5 and talking about language support features, but I'm not a programmer and it all went a bit over my head... would you guys care to explain?

by **yecril71pl** » Sun Jan 09, 2011 8:31 pm

HTML supports declaring another resource to be a translation of the present resource into another language.

by **yecril71pl** » Sun Jan 23, 2011 1:29 pm

HTML5 does not help you translate Web content any more than HTML4 would. Just treat HTML as the user interface environment.
Of course, you can have a Web-aided translation service with a HTML front end, and a few such services are available, but it is an entirely different story. Translation tools usually work better with XML sources.