Design Strategies

Language Policies

• Who chooses which languages are supported?
• How does language affect with your concept of “things” on the site?
• How should language affect your URL structure?

  Which seems cleaner?

  /wiki/MyCoolIdea	/en/wiki/MyCoolIdea
  /conference/djangocon-us/2012/	/gr/conference/djangocon-us/2012/
  /user/jrandom/	/pt/user/jrandom/
  /settings/	/ru/settings/

  Django makes it easy to treat translation as a user preference using the set_language() view and as of 1.4 i18n_patterns() makes it easy to treat the first path component as the language - which avoids the need for cookies and works quite well with CDNs, spiders, etc. - and to translate URL components as well (e.g. /en/news/…, /es/noticias/…)

Authoring Policies

• Who's creating your content?
• Does anyone else translate it into other languages?
• Does anyone review it?

  Facebook hacked in France to insult someone's little brother

  When setting your language to French and choosing the option Signaler/bloquer cette personne (Report/Block this person in English) you are confronted by a rather strange option.

  In English, you will see choices such as Fake profile, Inappropriate profile info and Inappropriate wall post. But on the French site, the last mentioned option now says, in what reads like schoolboy French of an English speaker: En discution instantané, Le petit frère de Dylan Zéroosiix m’a insulter. (In instant messenger the little brother of Dylan Zéroosiix insulted me)