Well, after my outage for a few days I’m moving on to do some work on a new section for QS – namely those translations – its time I had a final answer for all those people who keep dropping by requesting info on, or even offering, translation services. The general idea is to pre-parse (read: code generation) as many language specific sets of templates as possible. As translation on the fly makes me a bit nervous (doing it every request seems something one should be able to avoid – well to some degree), so the aim is to borrow a little functionality from ezComponents, store translations within XML files, and for every release (or by command of the local Developer permissable user) generate translated versions of the English templates in one go, the aim of course being to cache them for later use.

That will still leave the database specific text for translation, but most of this are limited to some English descriptions of the content so on-the-fly translating for these is less painful – hopefully. Anyways the current task is the template translations only, that’s where the larger performance hit is since it effects everything – not just a limited array of values.

Using ezComponents will allow a shortcut in terms of coding my own system, and in either case its performance is negligible – it’s done once (usually before a release) not on every page request. If I can get it finished I’ll add it to the next release on March 20-25.