Ecosystem technical architecture

P.S. maybe we need to add "translatable" to the Open App requirements somewhere?

I think most concepts and statements are (literally) translateable. Do you mean something like "are compatible with one or more specific translation tools"?

Speaking for myself, @gregorycassel, I don't think "translatable" is related to translation tools. I guess some things, particularly technical things, can be translated with few issues. Personally, I've had much more experience of things that can be surprisingly tricky to translate. My experience is based mainly on English and Italian, with some awareness of French and a little Finnish. So I don't really understand you, Greg, when you say

"most concepts are (literally) translatable"

Can you give examples of the range of concepts that are translatable in this way, and perhaps any that you think may not be so easy?

Dependcs on how we define "translate". I think that few if any concepts, outside of extremely simple physical concepts, can be "perfectly" translated! I see translation as an art which tries to transport complex concepts into a new format.

With that in mind, I think that there are few concepts in most languages which can't be translated into other languages... however, "directly" translating one word into a word in a different language often is impossible.

BTW here's my definition of "concept" (in MOT):

A concept is an idea which relates elements.

That definition is unusual and certainly not well-known. It was however the basis of my statement which you quoted. (I think that relationships can usually be translated.)

Does that help to clarify somewhat?

What I mean by translatable is that everything in the user interface can be translated into different languages, and any given user can select their language of choice. See attached screenshots.

the other screenshot in Spanish
(apparently Joining Process has not been translated)

What I mean by translatable is that everything in the user interface can be translated into different languages

Okay, but "can be translated" by what? I guess you'd like to identify some specific translation tool or standard which data (and user interfaces) should be compatible with?

(For example, we could specify that data collected by OAE tools should be effectively translatable by Google Translate. Although I'd probably recommend some open source translation standard instead.)

I'm not sure how else "translateable" could be evaluated. I guess it'd be possible to create specifications for data entry formats which would make entered data easily translatable into most if not all languages-- but, I also guess that that'd be a huge R&D project.

The translation from English to Spanish was done by the Fair Coop community, which includes several excellent translators. They all collaborated to do the work using https://www.transifex.com/ which is not open source as far as I know, but is free for open source projects.

OCP uses the Django framework, which offers features for translation:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.11/topics/i18n/

Lynn and I did the technical translation setup in Django, and one of the Fair Coop devs did all the setup in Transifex.

I hope that makes it less mysterious.

The user-entered data is not yet translated, but one of the Fair Coop devs wants to set up the framework for that. Fair Coop is a multi-lingual organization, so more languages will follow. They are also setting up facilities for refugees, which means, even more languages.

So what I mean by "translatable" is having the kind of setup that Lynn and I did in Django, and possibly also the additional features for translating user-entered content.

That is a lot to ask for small projects, and I hesitate to require it. But increasingly, technical frameworks are providing facilities for translation, so it might be doable in many cases.

Thank you, @gregorycassel I'm a lot clearer about your position now.

My point, and I guess we largely agree, may be that it can be very inelegant, and may feel quite unnatural, to translate some concepts directly. The art may need further study and elaboration?

@bobhaugen -- does your idea of translatable then include the idea that terms are chosen so that they are not peculiar to one language? I'm guessing that maybe that's not your prime concern...

does your idea of translatable then include the idea that terms are chosen so that they are not peculiar to one language?

Has not, so far, but that's an interesting and maybe good idea. Do you think there might be a tradeoff between communicating clearly to the people who understand one language, and maybe adopting some term that might be more understandable as-is to people who speak other languages?