[Koha-devel] Language overlays or: On the way to finally resolve important translation issues in Koha

[Marc Véron]

Dear Koha community,

Koha is translated in almost 50 languages - but it has no possibility to
switch between languages for authorised values and item types (or more
generally: database content).

This is a long outstanding issue, see the discussion on Bug 7789
(2012-03-22). And it is a really painful one for multilingual countries,
organisations, schools, museums, libraries...

Especially the OPAC looks not very professional when untranslated text
pops up.

There are several more or less ugly workarounds:
1) Have all language versions in the same description, e.g. for OPAC_SUG
something like
   "Damaged | Beschädigt | Abîmé"
   "Upcoming title by popular author | Neuer Titel eines populären Autors
|Oeuvre... ... ... "
2) Have some sophisticated JavaScript tricks
3) Have custom Plug-ins
5) Locally tweak the code
6) Provide custom packages

A couple of days ago I filed Bug 14063 - Implement language overlay for
authorised values

It is a small, minimal invasive patch (19 lines) that uses additional
entries in the table authorised_values. To use it, one can simply create
an additional entry with a trailing language code, e.g. BSELL-de-DE or
BSELL-fr-FR
It can be used "As is" without any changes to the database or to the user
interface.

A similar patch for Item types (Bug 14064) is in preparation.

In comment #5 on Bug 14063, Joubu proposes to have a more generic solution
with a table with columns "type" column (will contain "authorised_values",
"item_types", "sysprefs", etc.) and "lang" ('fr-FR', 'de-DE', etc.). The
complexity will be to implement an ergonomic view to edit the different
translation.

I totally agree with this. Typo3 CMS, for example, works with such
language overlays e.g. for page content, and it works great.

I'm best willing to help to implement such a generic solution. However, my
concern is that it could take a very long time to get there.

Now I have following questions:
- In what (realistic) timeframe / for what Koha Version could such a
generic solution be implemented?
- Based on your experience, what development time would be necessary?
- Who could contribute to this (time, maybe funding)?
- What do you think about kind of "Taskforce language overlay"
- What do you think to have Bug 14063 (Signed-off) and later Bug 14064 as
a transitory solution to fix the issue for the most exposed places (e.g.
Search interface in OPAC)? - I know and share concerns about temporary
solutions, but we simply would need a small SQL script to move the
language overlays from tables "authorised_values" and "itemtypes" to the
new overlay table (once the generic solution is ready).

Looking forward to your comments!

Have a great day!

Marc Véron
(mveron)