With Morgan Doocy — who, unlike me, actually knows how to code in PHP — I am working on a plugin to make WordPress comprehensively suitable for multilingual blogging.
Of course, we have a lot of ideas what we expect from a mulitlingual blogging tool (you may have noticed that this blog is already bilingual-and-a-half). These include optional multiple-language versions of any post, optional other-language summaries for posts that only exist in one (complete) version, multiple titles, correct “lang” and “xml:lang” attributes, switching the language of the entire blog, selectively switching any post to any language it exists in, preferred-language autodetection and cookie-saved reader choice, a link to WP localization …
Now I am looking for additional input. What would you expect from your tool if you run (or would be interested in running) a blog in several languages?
P.S.: Dave vouches for the Japanese in the title.
Related posts: Merriam-Webster & Firefox, Multi-lang II, What's your MP up to?, Language power-games, Seen elsewhere -- Avibase, CAPTCHA gotcha, Wiki
Technorati (tags): blog, localization, multilingualism, outils, tools, web, WordPress
Sounds great! Besides selective hiding and showing, I would add the option to display the different language versions in collumns side by side.
Sounds like you’ve already put much thought into the feature set; I can’t think of anything else. Just a few requests for code level behaviour though:
http://www.firasd.org/weblog/2005/01/19/metadata-uber-alles#metadata-uber-alles-2
The Multilingual Acknowledgement
I suppose, since others have already beaten me to blogging it (Chris, Firas), it’s probably time to mention my new plugin project here.
Handling Multilingual Blogs
When I began blogging again back in April last year I contemplated making this blog multilingual. Since some topics are only relevant to those who either speak Danish or who live in Denmark it would make sense to blog in two languages. …
Hello!
This is a great idea! I’m new to blogging and php, so many hacks and plugins require more coding or refer to concept I am not familiar at all. Your blog looks really good; I’m looking forward to your plugin.
Just to make sure; will it be possible to show all comments to a post regardless of their language and the reader’s preferred language? I want to encourage those visiting my blog and commenting to learn another language, or at least to have them aware of the diversity of languages. As a result, I want them to have access to a post in their preferred language, so they really understand what the post is about, but all comments in any language would be shown. I wish to see some interaction between different language comments, therefore linking all commenters in a bigger discussion.
Again, congrats on the effort!
Finally! Thank you in advance.
You might want to supply a configurable interface, were the different versions of one post can be created side by side (or on top of each other), in one form. Configurable meaning: I choose how many languages I need (I need four). Better even, if, when I want to edit a post I already published, I am presented with the versions in the other languages as well, to go over them at the same time.
It might also be nice to select encoding, and I hope you will include UTF-8.
There is some discussion about what exactly is a multilingual blog, and as opinions and needs differ, it seems to me that the user (blogger) should be able to decide, if he or she wants to serve identical, parallel pages in different languages, or different pages in different languages, or create only one page with multilingual content.
What I think should be the same on all pages of parallel, identical content are the comments. Visitors leave their comments in only one language. They are not translated (so cannot be served parallel), but - as many web sites show - even comments in different languages still react and refer to each other, forming a complement whole. So they should not be separated.