[afnog] afnog Digest, Vol 161, Issue 7

Fri Aug 18 11:15:00 UTC 2017

On 18/08/2017 11:12, kangazab at douanes.cd wrote:
> Cher Tous,
>
> Etant donné que la plateforme AFNOG a une vocation continentale, je
> suggère que le contenu publié sur son site web, ses atéliers, ses
> conférences soient entièrement traduit en français, arabe et portugais
> afin d'élargir son escarcelle d'interlocuteurs. Ce choix des langues
> reflète les statistiques des locuteurs sur le continent (en termes des
> langues officielles ou administratives). En fonction de la quantité
> des données à traduire cette opération peut s'avérer onéreuse, je
> propose que cette opération se fasse progressivement et qu'AFNOG mette
> sur pied un comité spécial qui concevra et mettra en oeuvre ce projet
> (et essaiera aussi de dégoter un éventuel financement auprès d'acteurs
> de tout bord dans la communauté).
I read/translate your e-mail from within Thunderbird on my Linux laptop.
I highlight your words and click on the translate icon. This works for
me quite well. I can do something similar when viewing non-English
websites, or simply translate the whole site.

However, I agree with you.
I also think that (apart from AFNOG.ORG) the AFTLD.ORG website should be
properly translated as well. The AFTLD website has a suggestion that the
site is available in multiple languages but everything is in English.

The AFNOG site is HTTPS and IPv6 enabled - that's very encouraging.
AFTLD is not. Both could though have DNSSEC added (ORG is DNSSEC
signed), then both could have DANE added. I say this because these
websites (as well as AFRINIC.NET - which is DNSSEC signed and includes
DANE) are what others from the African Region should be inspired to
follow as good examples of how things should be done.

----------------------------

Some thoughts on translation. I developed the Website/Questionnaire for
the DNS Africa Study ( dnsafrica.study is IPv6 reachable, HTTPS, DNSSEC
and DANE enabled)

The dnsafrica.study website has code that first looks at the language
settings that the user browser connects with. This becomes the default
language setting. The setting can obviously be changed by clicking the
appropriate language. We discovered selecting the language by using
words also makes more sense - rather than using country flags...
e.g.

*English (en)* <https://dnsafrica.study/index.php?lang=en>   Français
(fr) <https://dnsafrica.study/index.php?lang=fr>   Português (pt)
<https://dnsafrica.study/index.php?lang=pt>   العربية (ar)
<https://dnsafrica.study/index.php?lang=ar>

The system was written from an English language prospective - because
that my first language. Also, many Internet Terms are naturally English,
so getting any logic working there first seemed (to me) to be sensible.
Acronyms are possibly best left in English (e.g. DNS - Domain Name
System) though I do wonder how these are taught at University level in
other languages.
How the website progresses from there depends on whether what (if any)
CMS (Content Management System) is used. Due to the nature of the
project - I chose not to use one but developed the framework from
scratch. I stored all "phrases" into a MySQL Database - and wrote a
simple admin front-end for the database - to aid translations and the
management thereof. Effectively in the Web code, I had php code that
looked like...

// Preload ad-hoc translation phrases
$tdata=do_mysql("SELECT * FROM translate WHERE language='$lang'");
while($telem = mysqli_fetch_array($tdata))
    $translate[$telem['token']] =  $telem['phrase'];

-and used as-

<h2 class='center'><?php print $translate['MAIN_HEADING']?></h2>

In MySQL, 'MAIN_HEADING' would have a translation for each supported
language - such as:
en - A Study of the African DNS landscape,...
fr - Une étude du paysage actuel du DNS africain,...
pt - Um estudo da paisagem Africano DNS,...
ar -دراسة عن أسماء النطاقات الإفريقية،...

...and so on. Arabic is more of a challenge - the website also then
needs to be written right to left (sort of). Look at  --> dir='rtl'
We found our Arabic speakers quite happy with the finished product.
Perhaps they were just very forgiving.

This mechanism also makes it very easy to then translate the essence of
the website into other languages - e.g. Swahili

We left all graphics untranslated - though one could use a similar
technique.

We used Google to do the initial translations and then had a native
speaker(s) per language to check and rewrite as necessary - which made
the whole translation process much easier/faster. From this - we noted
that Google had less issues with European languages in comparison to Arabic.
Because of the separate (database) web based system to manage
translations, phrases that were repeated in the website only need to be
translated once and it allowed for multiple people to interact with it
at their convenience. Each translator had their own login so we could
see who translated what.

I'd be happy to share our code with the afnog.org/aftld.org website
developers if this will help them. Eventually, websites that serve the
African community could all be in multiple languages, be accessible via
IPv6, be HTTPS protected (Let's Encrypt is free), have DNSSEC for their
DNS along with DANE/TLSA records to cross-check their HTTPS Certificate.

-- 
Mark James ELKINS  -  Posix Systems - (South) Africa
mje at posix.co.za       Tel: +27.128070590  Cell: +27.826010496
For fast, reliable, low cost Internet in ZA: https://ftth.posix.co.za

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