ubuntu-appstore-developers team mailing list archive

[James Tait <james.tait@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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On 21/06/13 16:05, Martin Albisetti wrote:
> So, translations. I've been talking a bit with the people closer
> to the potential customers for the Ubuntu Phone, and it seems we
> will need to have a basic i8n story in place after all.
> 
> Thinking about the simplest way possible, and since the relevant 
> metadata (description, etc) will be entered and live on the
> server, I'd like to explore us just having a simple toggle on the
> web ui that switches between languages and people can type in (or
> paste) the text for each language. I'd like to explicitly exclude
> any automation for metadata translations for the moment as that
> would be much more complex. Also, this discussion excludes the
> actual application's translations.
> 
> So, Matias, Ricardo, Michael, James, what would we need to do in
> order to support this both on the MyApps side and on the search
> index side of things?

Well, I know Solr offers at least some level of support for multiple
languages in its TextField, but I'm not sure exactly how it works.  At
a high level, I think we could index localised fields one of two ways:

 - one field per language, with a suffix on the field name, e.g.
   description_en = "My awesome app"
   description_fr = "Mon app trés bien."
 - one multiValued payload field, keyed on language, e.g.
   description = [
     'en|My awesome app",
     'fr|Man app trés bien"
   ]

The problem with the latter approach, as I currently understand it, is
that it would be indexed on the language key, so I'm not sure if we'd
be able to search on the actual localised description text.  On the
other hand, it does make the localisation mostly transparent - we just
select the description field regardless of the language we want, and
probably return the appropriate version based on the request headers
or an optional query parameter, rather than having to mangle the
request to append the localisation suffix to field names.

We have a similar consideration with the price field and its currency,
and I want to get to the bottom of both of these problems as soon as
possible - they're the biggest unknowns for me at this stage.

JT
- -- 
James Tait, BSc. | https://launchpad.net/~jamestait/
Software Engineer, Canonical Online Services, Web and Ops Team
Ubuntu - Linux for human beings | www.ubuntu.com
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