I18n (was Re: [Koha-devel] From the Kaitiaki)

[Ambrose Li]

On Mon, Sep 16, 2002 at 08:06:46PM -0400, Nicholas S. Rosasco
wrote:

> --------------------------------------------------------------
> This is also the case in "my" library. Because Koha will
> support MARC, this problem is partially solved (e.g., the
> existence of the "246" tag; we use a subfield inside "245" to
> encode parallel titles, but that breaks down when the book has
> three titles e.g., Chinese, English, and French).
> --------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At a thought, worst case is we can possibly solve this with
> some trickery with multiple "branches"... instead of somewhere
> being just locationname, it could have multiple branches
> covering the multiple languages or somesuch?

Yes, this is certainly possible, but the resulting database
structure will become difficult to understand. What I think
is, *if* MARC supports this to some degree, since Koha already
supports MARC, perhaps it could exploit its MARC support to
support multilingual authors/titles/etc.; otherwise (i.e., if
MARC doesn't do these things, or if it does them really badly),
we might want to rethink about the database structure. We
could do trickeries, but trickeries could impact Koha's
maintainability in the future, and possible also the speed of
searching in the meantime.

Perhaps I should not comment so much before I can get my Koha
up and running properly. I probably don't know what I'm talking
about :-(


-- 
Ambrose Li  <a.c.li at ieee.org>
http://trends.ca/~acli/  http://www.cccgt.org/

DRM is theft - We are the stakeholders