[CREATE] Fwd: Re: [LGF-LGA] Ok, let's start with a website

[Yuval Levy]

On August 12, 2010 05:18:01 am a.l.e wrote:
> what i've read should be ok for multilingual sites is spip. has anybody
> something against it?

I don't know spip but I have done extensive research about CMS for 
multilingual sites a couple of years ago and the best one IMHO was Drupal 
(v6).

"multilingual" is often interpreted in two different ways: the *silos 
approach* and the *atomic approach*.

The silos approach is the more common.  The underlying assumption is that a 
user will enter the site in one language and stay in that language.  All there 
is to multilinguism are links to the entry point of the website in the 
different languages.  This has negative effects on maintenance (each language 
site tend to get a life of their own, with some being more up to date than 
others) and on search.  Especially when the subject matter has specialist 
terms in a particular language (English in our case), alternative language 
content tend to be underrepresented in search results.

The atomic approach is technically more demanding, but fixes the above 
mentioned search problem.  Ideally translation/language links are made at the 
individual content element level;  translators are helped by a list of yet to 
be translated content; there is a fall-back sequence toward the front end so 
that users navigating the site in a language that is not completely up to date 
get to seamlessly fall back to another language.

I see the atomic approach on Wikipedia ([0] vs. [1], see the list of languages 
on the right which seems to be dynamically generated depending on whether the 
content is available in that language or not) but I do not know how this is 
implemented in the MediaWiki software.

Back then, I found that Drupal offered all the necessary tools to manage a 
multi-language website with atomic approach.

HTH
Yuv

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkscape 
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribus