Multi-Language? How does it work?

Help / Discuss
#1

Hi,

I am on Wiki 12.10.1.

I want to have a multi-language wiki. So:

  • in Content->Localization, I set Multilanguage to Yes.
    Default Language is English
    In Supported languages, I choose languages:
    English, French, portugese, Greek and Russian

So, I have this:
image

So, When I go in Home, in the menu of the page, I get a Translation option:
image

And in the ‘Hamburger’ menu, the list does not fit too:
image

First, the different lists are not the languages I choose… Why? How to make these lists work?

Second, The ‘translation’ list (in the Home menu) does not show English. So, if I choose French, I cannot come back to English. (I can by forcing language=en in the URL, but it’s not good for users).

Third, If I choose say, Portuguese (there is no HOME version for this one), it shows the English version (good). But if I edit it, it is the English version which is modified when I sve, not the Portuguese version which is created.
More, I want Greek too, but nowhere there is Greek…

So, my questions:
What does Multi-Language=YES really do?
How do I achieve my goal, which is to have pages in multiple languages, and allow a default page (English) if the local page does not exists? (There is a Translate Button if I choose a page with different language and it does not exists yet, but it does not seem to be present each time… In my case, when I choose German, the page shown is the english one, and the Translation Button is not there)
How can I create a Local page? (And if the page does not exist, maybe let the user to choose is preferred language?)
Maybe in the User settings, we should find a Preferred interface language, Preferred text language?
And that all menus shows the default Language (English) and all the chosen languages? And the same information somewhere in the main page for guests?

Does someone know a way to do this (the documentation says that “The default language is indicated on the right “Document Information” panel as shown below:”, But the information does not show on my screen…

So, help will be welcomed to make this work like (I think) it should. Or I did not understand how it works, and updated documentation would be welcomed.

(@Vincent, if you want, I can give an admin access to you so you can experiment on my settings? This is not a production website, we are working to setting it up before putting any data)

best regards,
Christian COMMARMOND

#2

Hi,

So the first list you see by checking the translations of the page is the complete list of available translations for this page, no matter your language choices.
The second list in the hamburger menu is currently displaying the list of translations available for the current page and matching the list of languages you chose in the administration. That’s why it’s only a subset of the languages you chose. Now in your case it seems that it should indeed displays more language than it does. That’s probably something to investigate, don’t hesitate to open a JIRA ticket for it.

Not sure to understand the step you followed there: to edit the portuguese version you need to specify that you want to translate the English version. See: https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Documentation/UserGuide/Features/I18N#HEditatranslation

The translate button appears only when you’re on a page language that is not matching your browser current locale. So I expect that in your case the browser locale is English so the translation button doesn’t appear. That’s probably something to improve too, don’t hesitate to open a JIRA for this too.

Could you be more specific here? you should normally have an information tab on the bottom of the page like this: https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Documentation/UserGuide/Features/DocumentLifecycle/#HInformation

We definitely need to improve the documentation here, especially since some UIs have been changed recently.

#3

I also agree that there are at least 2 issues:

  1. It’s not natural to see all the available translations in the breadcrumb navigation when multilingual is on. IMO it would be better to only list those from the supported languages.
  2. In the drawer, it would also be good to indicate all supported languages (with some indications like greyed out if there’s no translation maybe or going to edit mode directly when there’e no translation and the user has edit rights). See https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-16589

We also have this jira: https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-6402

More generally here’s the list of existing open jiras related to languages: https://jira.xwiki.org/issues/?jql=text%20~%20"language"%20and%20resolution%20%3D%20Unresolved%20

As Simon said, If you have an issue that doesn’t already have a jira for it, feel free to create one.

Thanks

#4

Hi Vincent,

you just killed me on this… One Jira is 2014, the other is 07/2019. So, I don’t think that this will be done soon. What do you think?

And I am afraid that the problem, has I stated it in my message is more that just some dialog box to put here or there. (In your answers to my previous message, the GREEK case is not

So, what solutions do I have?
Create as many wiki servers than languages?

I think that my company could pay someone (1000€ plus VAT, we will need an invoice) who would make it work in the coming month.

regards,
Christian COMMARMOND

#5

It depends if someone provides a Pull Request for it or not. However you’re right, ATM, there’s nobody who has expressed an interest in working on this in the current roadmap (not that devs don’t think it’s important but rather that they think there are more important issues to fix for the moment, especially stabilization and bug fixing). Current roadmap is: https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Roadmaps/

Sponsoring some features/work is indeed a good pay to both contribute to the XWiki open source project and to have an issue that is important to you go in front of other issues in the roadmap. I’ll ping you privately to discuss this further.

Thanks

#6

Hi, Vincent,

thank you for your follow up.

I just posted another ‘complaint’ and improvement suggestion. I have 5 xwiki servers, and upgrade becomes a problem…

regards,
Christian COMMARMOND