Subject: [Fwd: Re: Translating DarwinDay.org from English to Greek]

From: David Harris <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2006 01:54:25 +0000

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Translating DarwinDay.org from English to Greek
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 04:44:25 +0200
From: NSK <[email-masked]>
Organization: Wikinerds
To: R.Stephens <[email-masked]>
References: <[email-masked]>

On Friday 25 February 2005 02:13, you wrote:
> We are currently planning how we can work with you to make Greek
> language versions of the Web site. We believe that technically we can
> deliver the Web pages for all languages, if you can send us the
> translated words.

I am sure other people will also be interested translating the website, so
here is what I believe to be the most efficient solution:

You can install a wiki on your site, in an address like
http://wiki.darwinday.org or http://www.darwinday.org/wiki where 
translators
can login and translate the English text online. An easy-to-use/install 
wiki
engine is MediaWiki available from http://www.mediawiki.org - this can be
configured to allow everyone edit the wiki, or limit editing only to
logged-in users, or enable only people you trust to edit the wiki. If 
you use
this software, I could offer advice for its setup and configuration.

In the wiki you can create namespaces (collections of pages) for the 
various
languages (for example, en:, fr:, el:, de: etc) and in every namespace you
can copy-paste all English text appearing on the Darwin Day website (in
several pages). The en: namespace can store the primary English text and
whenever you want to change some text on your website, you can first change
it in the English wiki namespace so that the translators can see the 
changes
(every change in the wiki is logged) and update their translations.

If you have a group of people who could check daily for spam etc, you can
allow everyone to edit the wiki, but if you are concerned about
vandalism/spam you can limit editing only to people who have asked to 
become
translators.

I have already translated www.openformats.org using a wiki and it is 
very easy
in this way.

Technically, You only need to have the ability to use PHP and MySQL on your
server; if you have it then you can install and customise the wiki very
easily. But even if you cannot use a database or execute php scripts, there
are other wiki engines that can work without mysql or php.

The software I proposed (mediawiki) can work with Unicode, so it could 
accept
all languages. After a new translation gets completed in the wiki, you can
just copy-paste the translated text on your actual webpages.

> We are also thinking about how to handle emails that 
> might come to us from people who communicate only in Greek.

Depending on my free time and availability, I can generally answer Greek
emails if they are no more than 5-6 per week. Just forward them to
[email-masked] with the indication that it is about Darwin Day.

> We will send you e-mails when the DarwinDay.org Web site is ready to be
> translated.  That might occur several weeks from now.

I am currently busy with my university project, but I will be available for
translating the Darwin Day website around the end of April or at the
beginning of May. Please feel free to send me emails anytime you want.

-- 
NSK (Nikolaos S. Karastathis)
Personal Homepage at http://nsk.wikinerds.org/
Owner of http://portal.wikinerds.org
Owner of http://www.nerdypc.org