Re: Website translations with Haunt

[Christopher Lemmer Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>]

pelzflorian (Florian Pelz) writes:

> I want to ask for your thoughts on my new solution since translations
> are probably important to many Haunt users.  In particular, I believe
> there was some discussion on Website translation on the Guile or Guix
> lists as well.

And not just important to Haunt... many sxml using projects!

At one point Mark Weaver and I were talking about something like a
special quasiquote that could be used for translations with gettext,
since many translations are very tricky in situations like:

`(p "Download from "
    (a (@ (href ,link))
       "this webpage") ".")

The naive approach would be to have different translations for
"Download from " and "this webpage" and (egads) "."

However this is called "lego translations" and unfortunately is nowhere
near as elegant as lego... different languages have different
word order so there is no safe way to "break apart" a translation like
this into bits.

The right way to do it using a special gettext quasiquote would probably
be like:

#_(p "Download from "
     (a (@ (href #_,link))
        "this webpage") ".")

or some such thing, which could then produce a string for translation
that looks like:

"(p \"Download from \"
     (a (@ (href #_,$1))
        \"this webpage\") \".\")"

or some such thing.

What do you think about this direction?  It would require some new
tooling, but I think it's the best way forward probably?