You are quite welcome. FWIW I've been a programmer, now called developer, systems analyst, etc, for about 25 years so I think about these kinds of issues all the time.

I'd like to keep the "comments to translators" as a seperate button rather than "comments to webmaster". This way it's quite clear to non base language users that we, as the website owner/translaters, are actively looking for suggestions. After all the volunteer translaters are not paid staff and are certainly not expert translaters. Also being a Canadian I'm aware of differences between Quebec French and France French. Being monolingual I have no idea what those differences are.

Ideally this emailed feedback would, not only indicate the exact page the comment is about, but would have a URL which the translator could click and bring up the base language text and the language specific text side by side so they could make the correct as quickly and easily as possible.

I'm not at all familiar with XOOPS so if you feel the groups implementation would work then fine by me. Hmm, another thought is that if one translater closes the comment then other translaters, if they click on the URL should be notified accordingly.

Also note that a website which is doing this kind of thing, which is quite relevant in my world, is www.trigeminal.com. While I don't know what kind of system Michael is running in behind the scenes, you can certainly see what his vision is. Michael is also an employee of Microsoft and is working on ensuring their products support many languages.

Folks

A couple of thoughts from someone who has never worked with XOOPS or any other content management systems.

I've had some requests to make one of my websites multi-lingual. However we have a few quirks that I haven't yet seen mentioned in this very interesting thread.

I would like to support an unlimited number of languages. But as my content is informational, and not commercial, I will be relying on volunteer translaters. Thus, while the more common languages might be available for the most popular pages, other pages might only have a few different languages. So if a given page isn't available in the chosen language I'd like to see it default to the base language, in this case English.

Portugese, I think, is similar to Spanish. Thus if a Portugese page isn't available then I'd like it to switch to Spanish and, if not available in Spanish, then to English. Mind you this likely won't happen often. Or maybe it will. I don't know. This is likely a low priority request as, presumably, there would be buttons somewhere on the screen which would display all the available languages for this particular page.

I will almost certainly be having multiple translaters for a given language. I'd like to ensure that all the translaters be notified of any new/changed pages.

I frequently add, update and much less occasionally delete, a link, sentence or paragraph to a page. It would be nice if the translaters could somehow see the changes highlighted.

It would also be nice if the older version(s) of the pages were available for comparison purposes.

It would also be nice if the translators could see the base language version on the left hand side of the screen and the current translated version on the right hand side of the screen. Or top/bottom, right/left, bottom/top as the translater chooses. After all some languages go top down and others right to left.

And, finally, I think , it would be nice if a user could comment on an awkward translation which is sent to the translator(s) responsible for that language.

Just some random usability thoughts on my part.

Thanks for reading.

Tony Toews