default link for untranslated books

[Eric "Sparks" Christensen]

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On 05/26/2010 04:41 PM, Ruediger Landmann wrote:
> On 05/27/2010 03:27 AM, Eric "Sparks" Christensen wrote:
>>
>> The easy way to do this is to publish all documents in all languages.
>> That way the guide would be available in English no matter if the text
>> was translated or not.
>>
>> Of course this would mean partial translations would be published which,
>> in my opinion, are better than no translation.
>>    
> 
> Actually, we can do it slightly smarter than that; Publican has an 
> option for exactly this use-case: the "ignored_translations" parameter 
> in the publican.cfg file.
> 
> For example, if "ignored_translations" in the Installation Guide was set 
> for Italian and Spanish, then when you built the book for those 
> languages, it would ignore any PO files available and just build the 
> book using the English strings. For very incomplete translations, I 
> think this is better than a book mostly in English with a paragraph 
> here-and-there in a translated language, but translation teams might 
> have other ideas?

So we would have to manually enter all the languages that we don't want
translated?

> 
> I can see two downsides though:
> 
> 1. It seems wasteful to have multiple copies of exactly the same content 
> stored on the server. It will also make maintaining the site much more 
> difficult if the site image (web.git) grows to something like 40 times 
> its current size. (although this will no longer be a problem when we 
> move to a fully automated publishing system shortly)

Well, we should plan on that kind of space, anyway.  If (when) all the
guides get completely translated we'll need that kind of storage.

> 
> 2. At the moment, when you see a book in a language menu, you know that 
> it is translated. The situation is not so bad for widely translated 
> languages, but for less widely translated languages, users will click on 
> links and most will be in English; they might not even discover that 
> *any* books have been translated into their language, so the hard work 
> of the translation team gets lost in a sea of English.

Maybe you tint the non-translated versions down to a gray.  You can see
them but they don't stand out like the translated versions.>
> Cheers
> Rudi

- --Eric
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