SuttaCentral
Hello,
A year ago Bhante Sujato mentioned that he plans to have localized version of SuttaCentral.
I think that would be very useful. For languages with few translations, like polish, one must go through many, many Suttas, before finding a one in polish.
Creating a welcome page in polish and index of Suttas in polish would enable users to read more translations easily. We could do this, but I guess jumping between 2 different webpages is not a good user experience.
Regards,
Wojtek
using the opportunity i’d like to voice one other suggestion concerning languages
as of now upon selection of a translation language on the collections pages one is immediately redirected to the page of the text for which one has made that selection, then the language selection sticks for all other texts on the collection page
it will be more convenient if one could select the translation language without having to leave the collection page at all
Thanks to both of you for the suggestions. Localization is still very much on the aganda. In fact it is the major priority once the translation software is sorted out.
@Wojciech, if I understand correctly, you’re saying that you could implement a Polish front end on your site? If you want to do that, we’d be happy to support you in any way we can.
Whether it’s a good idea or not is hard to say. On the one hand, it may be easier all around to simply wait for the SC localization to be built. On the other hand, it’s not a bad thing to have multiple approaches to cracking the same problem. If you designed a localized front end, we could see how it works and maybe learn something.
Anyway, if you do go ahead, let us know and we will support you.
@LXNDR, can you explain why that would be more convenient for you? The logic currently is, by selecting a translation in a particular language at the Sutta level, you are selecting a text. The system takes this as an indication that you want to read more suttas in this language.
Of course, we could implement a separate button to choose the language overall, but we try to keep our interface clean and avoid duplication of functions. It’s easy to add things to cater for every edge use case, but hard to keep things streamlined.
Nevertheless, in the localized version we will have some way of choosing the overall language, although we haven’t considered the details. Generally the idea will be that most users will use a localized version, which gives them SC in their language. But if you are are reading original languages, or swapping between languages frequently, you should continue to use the current interface.
maybe that’s because currently not all texts have translations in every language, when one can be sure to find a desired language whichever text one selects
implementation of my suggestion makes it immediately apparent on the collection page which texts have translations in a particular language, because upon selection all selector buttons go into that language mode
otherwise one needs to blindly go through each item hoping there’s translation in a particular language
although this is all true until the first translation text is selected, it’s still somewhat cumbersome
I have translated Suttacentral introduction to polish and published on our webpage under Tipitaka section.
I have also added links to polish texts on SuttaCentral.
Once you will be ready to do SC localization, you can use the same introduction:
http://sasana.pl/suttacentral
Wow, thanks so much! @blake and @vimala, take note: our users are internationalizing, so we should get onto it!
I will put it on the issue list in GitHub.
I have implemented a first pass at language pages, these exist in hitherto unused urls:
For example, all English translations:
https://suttacentral.net/en
When there are many translations, they are broken into divisions:
https://suttacentral.net/en/dn
In the case where there is a so-called “division length text”, it continues to work as it presently does, that is it takes you to the text and doesn’t attempt to generate a division page:
https://suttacentral.net/en/lal
It is also possible to put custom content on a language page, as I have here:
https://suttacentral.net/pl
(Note: This is all from http://sasana.pl/suttacentral - with one exception, I google translated “Early Buddhist texts, translations, and parallels”!)
Under the hood, making a custom page involves creating a template templates/language/<isocode>.html
Note that these pages are presently active on suttacentral.net (I’d considered making them only active on staging, but I don’t see them doing any serious harm) but at present there are no links to them, if you manually create the url they will work.
I like it very much! I am very happy to see polish version!
There is a small mistake you could easily correct:
First paragraph’s title is: “Dla kogoś, kto czuj” and should be : “Dla kogoś, kto czuje”
I would also change “Wczesne buddyjskie teksty, tłumaczenia i podobieństwa” to “Wczesne buddyjskie teksty, tłumaczenia i paralele”
The navigation panel on the live site is broken, please fix ASAP. I don’t think it’s a good idea to use the live site for testing, please deploy to staging instead.
I haven’t had time to check the changes, will do so soon.
Very nice! I will find somebody to do a German translation too.
Some comments/feedback:
Would it be an idea to have the language-sites exactly the same as the site we have now, just with the static pages and start-pages in different languages. Then in the language-dropdown behind each sutta can list the appropriate language as default.
If we put all the available suttas in a language on the start-page, the page for some languages like Vietnamese will become extremely big. (and I like the random blurbs from the suttas it starts with).