Did you enable the locales from Global settings > Regional first?

Yes, and as stated everything else is localized so it is ´just´ the date and time that don´t get translated.

/tsr

It might be hardcoded in that particular skin. Can you try the other one?

Hm, ok, it seems the date showed to vistors depends on what language the writer sets the post to. This seems like a strange way of deciding that especially since it requires me to make that change for every post I make (having the blogs default language be Swedish and the whole installations top priority language be swedish doesn´t help).

Either way I think the dateformat should not have to be manually set for every post.

/tsr

This is how it works:
Global locale > Blog locale > User locale > Post locale

Post locale overrides all other locale settings.

Yeah, which is imho completely backwards.

The visitor should have more control over the locale than the writer/admin. If I go to a site and only see text I don´t understand I´ve come to a dead end but on the other hand if there is something I can understand I can still navigate the interface.

Or for example, say that I can understand english enough to follow a simple howto but I am not aware of the common en-US dateformat. I go to a site and read a howto but before I start I want to know when it was written (as that may be important to see if the prerequisites of the howto are relevenat in my case too) and I see something that looks like a date and time: "1/9/3 12:34 pm". Without knowing in what dateformat and a possibility to check what this dateformat means I have no idea if the howto was written in 2001, 2003 or 2009 (which makes a difference).

/tsr - I am not sure that I managed to make my self clear

Nah that's not right. The visitor isn't even part of the decision making process! The language of the post itself is way more important than any other bit b2evolution can deal with. The installation might be in the US, the blog might be in French, and the blogger might be blogging in German. So it makes sense for all bits associated with that post to be in German instead of French or English.

Now imagine a German traveling to the US. This person visits the website described above because the traveler recalls some good information about where they happen to be. The page shows up in German *because* the post author identified it as German. It should not show up in English simply because the visitor happens to be using an IP associated with an English-speaking nation.

Well, imagine you live in germany, communicate only in german and hear about this amazing piece of software for editing images: the gimp. Unfortunately the developers of gimp only communicate in english so even if there are translators that have translated the text in the software to german you have to ask the developers (or someone else) to build a german version of the gimp.

One other possibility is that the gimp recognizes a setting on your computer that asks it to show its text in german and if that text is available you get it in german. To me that seems reasonable.

And that is how I think it should work:
- the visitor asks b2evolution to show its content in a given language (by configuring the browser).
- all content that exists in that language is shown in that language and the content that doesn´t exist in that language is shown in another language (preferably by going down a list of prefered languages of the visitor, and as a default show it in the language that the author wrote it in).

The above system ensures that the visitor will be able to communicate the most with the software regardless of what language the author uses.

/tsr

Aw come on. That means that somehow software can figure out syntax and grammar across languages.

Why not ask browser people for it? Or maybe the people who make GIMP?

Whatever. Not a b2evo issue for sure.

It's better to have a language switch bar where you can unconditionally force any available locale.

Interesting idea... Do you mean for the visitor to be able to say with a click "give me what you can in {{language}}"?

Right
I already done this some time ago. You can check here http://sonorth.com/travel/?disp=login
Click on the flag in the top left corner to force English or Russian

EdB wrote:

Aw come on. That means that somehow software can figure out syntax and grammar across languages.

Why not ask browser people for it? Or maybe the people who make GIMP?

Whatever. Not a b2evo issue for sure.

Hehe, well, I saw this coming. I am sorry I wasn´t clear I don´t mean that the text of the posts should in some magical way be translated. What I mean is that all the information that makes up the UI of the application should be translated (if there is a translation for it).

The equivalent for the gimp would be that all menus, tooltips, etc would be translated but that the manual would not. Or to make an even more obvious example: OpenOffices user interface should honor the locale of the user viewing a document regardless off in which language the document is written.

I think this clearly is a b2evo-issue.

sam2kb wrote:

It's better to have a language switch bar where you can unconditionally force any available locale.

While this is good, most browsers already have the possibility to ask for a specific locale. To require users to make that change on every site they interact with is imho a waste of time (not only the users but also all the developers that will have to code that possibility into every single site (at least the ones that are intended for people that communicate in different languages)).

Again I ask if someone could point me in the right direction to create a patch that solves this issue. Maybe I will just have to dive into the code and try to figure it out myself, but I think it is much quicker if someone who knows the code just tells me around where I should start looking.

/tsr

tsr wrote:

Hehe, well, I saw this coming. I am sorry I wasn´t clear I don´t mean that the text of the posts should in some magical way be translated. What I mean is that all the information that makes up the UI of the application should be translated (if there is a translation for it).

Agreed, visitor locale should be king ;-)

¥

Nope. sam2kb has the right approach because you have absolutely no way of knowing the visitor's preferred language. You can take a guess based on IP address, but that is only a guess. What about people traveling for fun or work? What about people who permanently moved and visit sites in a language they're more comfortable with? They're all screwed if their IP doesn't happen to match the language they'd prefer.

EdB wrote:

Nope. sam2kb has the right approach because you have absolutely no way of knowing the visitor's preferred language.

header [url=http://www.developershome.com/wap/detection/detection.asp?page=acceptCharsetHeader]accept-charset[/url]

*disclaimer, first result in google

¥

*edit*
Better search : [url=http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-accept-lang-locales]accept-language[/url]

b2evo already autodetects language pretty well, see locale_from_httpaccept function, but the problem is that blog locale, user locale and post locale override the autodetected one.
So the best thing is to provide a language bar and save locale in cookies.

Isn't the point of this topic that the default evo behaviour needs to be changed?

v

I don't think it needs to be changed. My point is b2evo should have a built in language bar widget with the functionality described above.

tsr wrote:

Well, imagine you live in germany, communicate only in german and hear about this amazing piece of software for editing images: the gimp. Unfortunately the developers of gimp only communicate in english so even if there are translators that have translated the text in the software to german you have to ask the developers (or someone else) to build a german version of the gimp.

/tsr

Alright, alright. Just create a fork already!

I think it's not to be changed too.