[Zope3-dev] Picking the language at product instantiation

[Guido van Rossum]

Here's a question about the suitability of the job board example for
automatic translation.  Since much of the actual content (the job ads)
is submitted by users of the site, it doesn't make much sense to
translate the site boilerplate automatically based on the language of
the visitor, since the job ads themselves aren't translated.  It would
be funny if an English-language visitor of a Dutch job board saw
English boilerplate around job ads in Dutch...

For this kind of product, it may make more sense to be able to pick
the language when the main object is created -- in this case, when you
choose "Add..." from the management menu to create a job board
instance.  How hard would it be to add that feature?

If you don't add this feature, the job board doesn't make a great
demo, because this defect becomes quite obvious as soon as you've got
a job in the system and show switching languages.

A fancy alternative might be to record the language used when a job is
submitted, and only show job ads matching that language.  But that's
more work, and probably not the desired semantics anyway (I may be
visiting the site in English but I still know Dutch :-).

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)