Language question and offer

[Vector’s Shadow]

More explicitly: My database is UTF-8. That's irrelevant. The question is about files and has absolutely nothing to do with the database.

Not to your original question, it wasn't.

It was. The original question was about the UTF-8 English file package. Think anything else about it and you've misinterpreted it.

[Arantor]

-sigh- Except the language file generally predicates how the database will be communicated with. If the language file says 'UTF-8', the database connection will be in UTF-8. If it doesn't explicitly say UTF-8, the database connection could be anything, but typically Latin1 (ISO-8859-1) which is why the UTF-8 language files even exist for English.

There are multiple internal settings *on top of this*, one in Settings.php ($db_character_set), one in the settings table ($modSettings['global_character_set']), both of which might also affect things. But this is why the entire process is such a minefield - there are so many places to check things that may have a direct bearing on what you're trying to do, such as using literals as opposed to entities.

Oh, and if any of this stuff mismatches, posts will invariably damaged too. So it is kind of important to get it right.


I would like to say that I hope I've been helpful but I haven't been, so I'll leave it there. Hopefully I'll have something helpful to say tomorrow, but I wouldn't bet on that.

[Vector’s Shadow]

Is that documented somewhere? about "if the language file says 'UTF-8', the database connection will be in UTF-8", I mean? I couldn't locate it. This really should be on the package download site, right above the downloads!

[Kindred]

wow... a lot of discussion.

BTW: I disagree with your basic contentio.
Personally, I **HATE** the right and left angled quotes. With the exception of Word (which makes it diffifcult to do) I remove them from my documents and my websites any time I can.

So, I am unsure why you contend that the right and left quotes are "better" than the straight quotes, even when using html entities...

[emanuele]

@This Forum admins: Also, it's really annoying to see that when my users will (nobody on the forum yet) try to use Help in the language other than English, they will get a rather nasty empty page that tells them exactly nothing useful for many topics. I could create reasonably high-quality translations for some of those pages, especially shorter ones, and could make an attempt to make a small number of existing translations less "techy" (since they are, after all, for the users, but are written as if for veteran users/admins).

It's a wiki, as soon as you will reach 10 messages here on the forum (anti-spam measure...sorry, but I think it can be by-passed) you will be able to edit those pages...well, at least some of those, it may be necessary to add you to a group, but that wouldn't be a big issue, just ask.

Sorry for double-posting, really should've made two different topics, but...

You do not have permission to edit this page, for the following reason:

You do not have permission to edit pages in the Translations namespace.

Looks like I will need to be added.

Just to easily track your username (there are some differences between SMF and MW nicks), could you please edit your user page (you can find it going to any wiki page and looking at the "user info" box, upper left corner) and/or link it here?
Sorry for the trouble, I forgot to mention it before.

[Arantor]

Is that documented somewhere? about "if the language file says 'UTF-8', the database connection will be in UTF-8", I mean? I couldn't locate it. This really should be on the package download site, right above the downloads!

Documentation? SMF?

Hahahahahahahahahahahaahahhahahahahaha

No, it's not documented anywhere. Though when the conversion to UTF-8 is done it does actually tell you that you need to get the UTF-8 language files.

[Vector’s Shadow]

@Arantor: I hear ya.

@emanuele: I changed my page here: Wiki Profile to include the link to your request. I wish my login name wasn't used, but the forum name or some other alias. Oh, well, it works this way on other sites, too, so I guess I can't be too picky about it.

@Kindred: Thank you for stating your opinion. I like the true typographical symbols because they make web pages look more book-like. I know people who love them and people who hate them. It's a matter of taste in the end. But I'd love to discuss the benefits and pitfalls of either approach. By the way, Word can (or that used to be the case) be convinced to stop autocorrecting your quotes if you don't like the "smart" ones.

[emanuele]

Try now.

[Vector’s Shadow]

Thank you, seems to be working.

I can haz review (when done)?

[emanuele]

I can haz review (when done)?

Depending on the language you are translating to...

[Vector’s Shadow]

LOLCat, Pig Latin, Java, C, and even BASIC are not on the list, for shame! So I had to settle for Russian.

[Vector’s Shadow]

I have finished translating Profile. Would love some feedback. Some mistakes could be hard to correct if carried over to other pages.

For below, tl;dr: Please make translatable pages translator-friendly!

By the way, there's a wikilinks vs llink problem on that page. I had to work around it by using HTML comments, but an updated version of the extension may not be as dumb as the current one when it comes to not ignoring links within the comments. (Did that even make sense?) Other languages that had 100% translations seem to have used the English wikilinks instead of llink, which means they won't work right when/if the destination pages finally get translated.

[emanuele]

I think for review you'd have better luck on the Russian board...

About the links: I tried changing the section 18 (Права пользователя, Show Permissions), removing the template trick, but it seems to work as expected, it's not marked as outdated and it is pointing to the appropriate link...yes, using the llink template is more "future-proof" unless at some point the wiki and the add-on will be updated *and* in the meantime the add-on has been fixed (no idea about the current state of development).
Did I miss anything obvious here?

[MrPhil]

@Kindred: Thank you for stating your opinion. I like the true typographical symbols because they make web pages look more book-like. I know people who love them and people who hate them. It's a matter of taste in the end. But I'd love to discuss the benefits and pitfalls of either approach. By the way, Word can (or that used to be the case) be convinced to stop autocorrecting your quotes if you don't like the "smart" ones.

Agreed. The proper quotation marks look so much better than plain ASCII ' and " straight quotes. That said, there are many complications. First, which style of quotes to use depends on your language. English uses "high" quotes, while German uses "low" quotes (sitting on the baseline) for opening quotes. French uses guillements (angle brackets). American English uses "reverse 9" opening quotes while British English uses "6" opening quotes. American English starts with double quotes as the outermost, alternating with single quotes for nesting, while British English does the reverse.

Word and Outlook by default have "Smart Quotes" on. They can be permanently turned off (unfortunately, not per-document), but it's a real PITA to switch back and forth. I was just required to write some programming documentation in Word, and it was such a pain to write everything in Smart Quotes and then have to go back through to fix all the code quotes to ' and ". As we all know, Smart Quotes cause infinite pain for SMF users who cut and paste from Word into SMF (why does anyone do that?) because they are non-standard encodings (they are seen as control codes by Latin-1 and UTF-8). Don't even think about passing real code (to be executed) through Word or Outlook, as it will be corrupted by ' and " turning into the wrong things.

That said, typographically correct opening and closing quotes appropriate for your language do look very nice. It's just that there can be some pain in the process. As an alternative to Smart Quotes, TeX and LaTeX use ` ' and `` '' (backticks for explicit opening quotes) and replaces them with the correct opening/closing single/double quotes during processing. It would have been nice for Word to use that instead of "autocorrecting" what I type.

[Arantor]

while British English does the reverse.

Does it? Well, damn, I hadn't noticed. And to think I was born and raised, and reside, in the United Kingdom. (Either style is acceptable here, with the other for nesting purposes. I tend to use ' in discussion because it's easier to type.)

[Vector’s Shadow]

I think for review you'd have better luck on the Russian board...

I recently posted a somewhat controversial statement on one of the most visible, if not the most visible, boards there, just to see if anyone was there to actually respond.

Cue tumbleweed...

So, yeah, I'm not so sure I want to actually ask anyone there for any help.

About the links: I tried changing the section 18 (Права пользователя, Show Permissions), removing the template trick, but it seems to work as expected, it's not marked as outdated and it is pointing to the appropriate link...yes, using the llink template is more "future-proof" unless at some point the wiki and the add-on will be updated *and* in the meantime the add-on has been fixed (no idea about the current state of development).
Did I miss anything obvious here?

LOL, I think you did the exact opposite of what I'd hoped you'd do, so you saw none of the problems.

The template trick does put a link that works on the page. That's not the issue though. Have a look at the source. You will see that I had to include those wikilinks inside HTML comments. Now, they are not supposed to be doing anything, right?, they are just comments. So, get rid of them. You will instantly get "missing link" messages when you preview, and the !!FUZZED!! formatting when you submit. That's the workaround that I came up with, including wikilinks and neutralizing them with comments. But that's not a good solution.

Edit: To clarify: I don't just mean for you to remove the comment markers, but the entire comments including their content.

Edit 2: The links should lead to pages in Russian (or whatever language the translation was done in), not English like they do now, but append /ru (/it, /fr, what have you), and you won't have much luck "unfuzzing" the paragraphs at least until the target page is created.

@MrPhil: re: docs: Ouch! When I have to mix things up like that, I usually make use of two editors, one that can autocorrect (more like "autoincorrect") and one that can't, usually some sort of plain text editor. Then it all boils down to just copying/pasting from one to the other.

[Vector’s Shadow]

American English uses "reverse 9" opening quotes while British English uses "6" opening quotes.

Do you have any references for this? I couldn't find anything at all whatsoever about it. AFAIK, they both use "6." I tried setting language to en-US in Firefox, which usually gets this right, and using <q>, but it showed "6" instead of "reverse 9" also. In addition, reverse 9 has no easy html entity, and some of my books are American-press, but no luck with the reverse 9, only 6 for opening double-quotes, so, I'm a little confused here.

[emanuele]

I think for review you'd have better luck on the Russian board...

I recently posted a somewhat controversial statement on one of the most visible, if not the most visible, boards there, just to see if anyone was there to actually respond.

Cue tumbleweed...

So, yeah, I'm not so sure I want to actually ask anyone there for any help.

lol
I know...now 3 active Russian members here around: you, Bugo and Inter, it may take a while.

The template trick does put a link that works on the page. That's not the issue though. Have a look at the source. You will see that I had to include those wikilinks inside HTML comments. Now, they are not supposed to be doing anything, right?, they are just comments. So, get rid of them. You will instantly get "missing link" messages when you preview, and the !!FUZZED!! formatting when you submit.

Okay, now I got what you meant.

That's the workaround that I came up with, including wikilinks and neutralizing them with comments. But that's not a good solution.

Edit: To clarify: I don't just mean for you to remove the comment markers, but the entire comments including their content.

Edit 2: The links should lead to pages in Russian (or whatever language the translation was done in), not English like they do now, but append /ru (/it, /fr, what have you), and you won't have much luck "unfuzzing" the paragraphs at least until the target page is created.

The "problem" is that the plans for wiki translation/localization/organization have never been finalized.
There are few discussions on the Doc help board on the subject with some alternatives.

Summarizing: put the entire wiki *now* under the "control" of the translation extension is at the moment a no-go because of the limits of the current version (it's a sort of moderation nightmare) and the impossibility to upgrade the wiki doesn't allow us to upgrade the extension.

That said, for a start the idea was to translate the help pages accessible from each and every installation of SMF that are those "most important" (those pages are intended for forum end-users, not for admins, so they are the "top priority"), all the others are in a sort of limbo.

If you want to raise the discussion again, feel free to open a topic there.
I know Oldiesmann was going through the site-team todo list that includes upgrade wikimedia. The todo list is quite long and I have no idea on the prioritization.

[Vector’s Shadow]

I see. I'm not sure I want to open another can of worms by restarting that discussion. I guess I'll just be using the template and keep doing that little dirty trick with comments. To that end, you'll probably want to undo your edits.

[MrPhil]

American English uses "reverse 9" opening quotes while British English uses "6" opening quotes.

Do you have any references for this?

Well. When I was young, I was taught  (American schools, back when they were actually good) that the proper opening quote was the "high reversed-9" style (see U+201B and U+201F). I've noticed over the years that the British style "high 6" style has become more and more common in American publishing. In response to your request, I looked around to try to find a style guide (AP, Chicago, etc.) that used "American" style quotes, but everyone seems to have switched over to British style. Personally, I think the "high 6 style" looks a bit nicer, although I'm still not used to the opening and closing quotes not being optically aligned (the opening looks a bit lower because the most of their mass -- the filled counters -- is lower than the closing "9"s). Anyway, I went through my library, and the oldest book I have (1948) is using British style.

Use whichever style pleases you, British or American. I don't think anyone will complain if you use ⁶⁶quoted⁹⁹ style. If they do, tell 'em to find a sharp tack and sit on it.