In our company (Belgium) we always want all post to be in both languages.. so it would be way cool to have 2 blogs with internal links to the other language...
That's how we solve it for the moment.... But that is not ideal at all, because our comments are in two blogs....

The tricky thing about it for us, was that it must be possible for readers to comment in their own language.. (messages top down go multi-language, mesages bottom-up go 1 language.
Also, it must be possible for the user to choose their own language, and then everything on the front changes to their language...
The post content, but not the post comments....(they see that in both languages)

Yabba once wrote something that was css based..
That worked, but was not authorfriendly (but it worked)
You write both text in 1 post with a different div languageblock. And you have two skins, looking the same but with a different main language...

When you come to this, I can tell you all the ins and outs of handling multilanguage things like this in a multilangue company... (by law we are multilanguage)

Assuming the same global functionnality, would it feel more natural to :

* have 2 blogs with some kind of cross posting or cross linking

or to

* have 1 blog with some kind of filtering

With a mate's blog, she posts in english and french. (primary is english).

So when a user access the page, we check their locale, if it is french then we use french, if it is english we use english. Instead of use whatever the user's locale is.

I think this is a better solution than simple 'use whatever locale the user wants'.

But then again, i plan for a 'translate' plugin to come out eventually, in which case, we would want the locale to be whatever the user wants...

Is this what your looking for?

The most natural would feel the way we do it now I suppose : 1 blog for every language...
(but that it is possible that it would feel natural because we do it like that at the moment - kind of chicken and egg story)

BUT : if the same post exists in x languages, all comments must be visible in all language...

So you can have an english blog and a french blog and a dutch blog
some posts will be only english, and you see them only in the english blog
some posts will be translated and exist in the 3 blogs with a big link between them : you see the french translation in the french blog, the dutch translation in the dutch blog, the english translation in the english blog, but all comments in all 3 languages you see on the 3 blogs... because people are commenting in there own language to the same post..

Never thought about it that way.

But seems a lot of work.... And seeing for each blog it's the same content, just in a different language...

Maybe...

Have it so, users can do posts in a different language.

So;

-----------------------------
[bold] [em] [link]
-----------------------------
[english] [french] [add]
-----------------------------
If english is selected this
is english.
-----------------------------

So say when viewing a post they have;
View in English or French.

Get the idea.

Then if a translator plugin came along there could be;
View in English or French, or translate into [your language].

In order to share the comments, we'll definitely have to store different translations in a single post.

once that is done, the post could easily be category-cross-posted into different blogs and each would display the translation that matches the locale of the blog.

However, you would have to link the blog to the same category in different languages. Kind of boring, no ? (also the blog would have a main category in the main language only which can be limiting at some point)

The harder way would be to have the categories translated too. Then there would be an additional param to choose the locale to display any blog in (would default to the blogs locale)

Sth like
?blog=2&loc=en
?blog=2&loc=fr

More work, but probably more flexible. Is it worth going that route?

---

Second question: if the user wants french and 9 posts out of 10 are available in French, but one is only in english. What would you want to do with that 10th post? Display it in English? Display a link? Ignore it silently?

Here's an idea. When the blogger posts they have a new link to click on called "add a language". Clicking that reloads the write page with a second post textarea and a language selection box. Click it again for a third language. Kinda like how file manager lets me upload 1 or 12 or 45 files in one shot.

All the other stuff above next to and below the traditional post textarea are still there and apply to all languages.

So now the blogger does the title and category selection and all that stuff, then writes their post in each language, then saves the post. It's a single post with multiple post_content fields, or maybe <!-- alt lang NN --> tags splitting the languages inside the existing post_content field, or somehow it keeps track of all the languages and is capable of delivering a single language to each visitor.

The visitor sees the blog in the blog's language and the post in the post's primary language, and has flags of the other languages with alt text "read in this language".

I still don't see why you don't make it so each post, can contain multiple post contents.

So one post can be in different languages.

So there would be;
evo_the_posts;
post_id, post_contents ( IDs of rows in evo_post_contents ), all_the_rest
evo_post_contents;
content_id, content_locale, content_text

Works for everyone... no?

fplanque wrote:

In order to share the comments, we'll definitely have to store different translations in a single post.

....

The harder way would be to have the categories translated too. Then there would be an additional param to choose the locale to display any blog in (would default to the blogs locale)

Sth like
?blog=2&loc=en
?blog=2&loc=fr

More work, but probably more flexible. Is it worth going that route?

This seems perfect for me...
Translate the categorynames and the blognames would be ideal...
fplanque wrote:

Second question: if the user wants french and 9 posts out of 10 are available in French, but one is only in english. What would you want to do with that 10th post? Display it in English? Display a link? Ignore it silently?

For us at the company, we would display the post in english with a remark that the translation is on is way, that this post for the moment is not yet available in french. Because we want all the posts to be visible for everybody, but our translation department is limited..

For normal bloggers.. I would say... make it a variable..
make it even a user variable... so they can choose what they see..
on ly in my language, or both languages...

EdB wrote:

It's a single post with multiple post_content fields

A single post is fine, as long as you can enter the title in different languages.
The title in french will be something different then in English.

Maby you can work with the <!--nextpage-->Français<!--endpage--> end page kind of thing (like the new plugin from AM)
and with the variable in the url loc=en you make it per default viewing that piece of the content..
and a skintag to show the different languages available...

Topanga wrote:

A single post is fine, as long as you can enter the title in different languages.
The title in french will be something different then in English.

True. I was typing as quick as I was thinking is my excuse. So yeah: if I want to blog in 2 or more languages I would want my title and content to have matching extra languages. I think to keep it user-friendly it should be one posting experience though. The trick is how to store it and what to display by default. For the default display I'd say whatever language was used for the first/initial title and content.

balupton: I *am* making it so that each post contains multiple language contents. That is the point. The questions are about how to manipulate those different contents once they exist.

everyone: no I won't do some <!-- dirty tag tricks -->. Once you have 3 languages in the same database field, how do you search on terms of a specific language?

I think I'll start with the ?loc= filtering stuff. It can already apply to blogs that contain different languages.

From there I'll add blog title and category title translation, in order to have language unified pages. At that point you only need the categories once (I hope this can apply to you too topanga)

Finally I'll add the huge multilingual/translatable posts thing.

fplanque wrote:

From there I'll add blog title and category title translation, in order to have language unified pages. At that point you only need the categories once (I hope this can apply to you too topanga)

I can live with whatever makes life easyer than it is now ;)

Hi all,

Several months ago, I have written a plugin called [url=http://www.yhtsai.idv.tw/blogs/index.php?blog=6&cat=14]PolyglotX[/url]. It can switch posts, titles, categories and blog's info into specific locales. Even the locale of the blog's interface can be specified. Of course, I did some hacks to implement it, but I think b2e has already prepared everything! :)

I can speak 4 languages: Mandarin (the canonical chinese), Taiwanese Minnanese (up to definition, you can see it as a dialect of Chinese), English, and Japanese. One purpose of my blogging is that I wanna practice writing in these langauges. It inspired me to write this plugin, and at least, it works fine for me.

Here is some of my suggestions for embeddeding multilingual support into evocore:
1. Using utf-8 for all locales in future releases can prevent some charset troubles.
2. I use the [lang_xx] label, but it's not a good idea. If the b2e team wanna develop its own dtd, then I prefer use this style: <b2e:lang locale=xx> :D
3. Word counting and multi-page are issues in this kinda implementation.

_____
[url=http://www.yhtsai.idv.tw/blogs/index.php?blog=6&cat=14]PolyglotX[/url]: A b2evolution plugin for polyglots (1.6 available, 1.8 coming soon)

Than .. I understand - b2evolution new version 1.9. have NOT plugin for multilingual blog? :(

No it has not

I try Polyglotx plugin but it work not with my version 1.9.
maybe I miss something ?

Please suggest idea :) - i do something wrong or here is another plugin that work?

Polyglotx is ideally for 2 and more language content blogs - when klik on flag, peoples see content that is put between language tags...

To tanite:
Yes, you missed something: the author's availability :oops:

I'm sorry that I am very busy in the last half of this year.
But anyway, finally I've finished the new released PolyglotX which supports b2evo 1.8 or later versions.
Just check out [url=http://www.yhtsai.idv.tw/blogs/index.php?blog=6&cat=14]my site[/url].

Btw, I wonder what the solution is for multilingual in 2.0.
Can any staff tell me the status?
I think PolyglotX is just a work around. The multilingual functionality should be designed from the top view of the core.
Thanks!

__
[url=http://www.yhtsai.idv.tw/blogs/index.php?blog=6&cat=14]PolyglotX[/url]: A b2evolution plugin for polyglots (Compatible with 1.6 or later)

There is one more aspect that wasn't discussed here.

• I write in 3 languages: English, Romanian, and Russian.

• My blog's GUI is in English - I want it to be English regardless of the reader's will :-)

• All the posts are shown in the same list of posts

• I customized the skin, so that the post's language is shown near the list of categories it is assigned to

[/list:u] My objective is to add three links to my navigation panel: Show posts only in English, only in Russian, only in Romanian - so that readers could easily remove the content they cannot understand. I think I will manage to achieve the above by querying the DB and obtaining only the posts that match the desired locale. I don't know how to do that, but will experiment. I have a mini-offtopic question: I changed the language description from "Romanian (RO)" to "Română" (I use non-Latin characters, and I removed the two-letter country code). Will this break any functionality in b2evo? I haven't revealed any issues, but you never know... In the same context - when I select the language for the post in the backend, the non-Latin characters are not shown correctly in the language-selection drop-down menu (while everything is OK in the post itself, and on the blog where the article is viewed). Update: I realize now that I cannot achieve what I want. My intention was to use one of the [url=http://manual.b2evolution.net/URL_Parameters]URL parameters[/url] described in the documentation, but there is no parameter there that allows me to choose my localization. Can this be considered as a feature request?

fplanque wrote:

- not cool for search engines which can't really tell the language of your page any more

Ideally, search engines should use the language you provide (though the Content-Language HTTP header and the lang and xml:lang attributes), but I know that none of them do, definitely because so many people mislabel their language (this is often beyond their control; LiveJournal blogs that are written in a non-English language are still marked as English, for example).

I just installed a 3.3.3 version of b2, to test its multilingual features (in the sense of this topic/discussion: multilanguage-post-content).

So what is the way to go, because I didn't get it until now and I couldn't find anything useful about how this really works (without php-modification or hacks) in the docs or forum.
But in the features on the about-page it says
- Multilingual blogging

so how am I supposed to do multilingual blogging with b2?

Thx, karfau

I found a cute free toolbar (Wibiya toolbar) , that solves a lot of tasks, and helps to handle multilingual blog (includes translator into 30 languages).

After adjustment of settings Wibiya gives Javascript to install it to website platform .

It looks this way:
http://archinoma.com/media/photo/wibiya.png

Please advise, in which of "php" files should I paste this script to make my PHOTOBLOG display this toolbar?

P.S. For Wordpress Wibiya gives a ready plugin. Is it possible to apply it somehow to b2evolution?

Aventoza wrote:

I found a cute free toolbar (Wibiya toolbar) , that solves a lot of tasks, and helps to handle multilingual blog (includes translator into 30 languages).

Please advise, in which of "php" files should I paste this script to make my PHOTOBLOG display this toolbar?

P.S. For Wordpress Wibiya gives a ready plugin. Is it possible to apply it somehow to b2evolution?

You have posted in the wrong topic but P:
Here you go,

http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?p=106030#106030

I feel that one must first ask yourself:
WHY a multilang. blog
- bilinguial contry like belgium-> translate all
- several audiences -> let them choose