Support for a Welsh translation

[alexdutton]

Overview

Democracy Club has a mandate via the Electoral Commission to provide this service in Welsh.

Django has good translation support, and it is mostly straightforward from a how-to-implement perspective.

We can get the framework in place, and then merge translations later.

I'd recommend we should not assume Welsh is not the only alternative language we will ever support, and design accordingly.

Previous issues for background

134 — Discussion about how to approach having a Welsh translation

244 — Copy edits for Welsh site from April 2016

High-level checklist

• [x] USE_I18N set to True
• [ ] All strings in templates marked with translation tags
• [ ] All strings in code marked with gettext/ngettext calls
• [x] The site logo/brand is translated (if desired)
• [x] We have an approach to translating things in the database
  • [x] Council names
  • [ ] anything else?
• [x] Have considered/translated dc_base_theme
• [ ] Have tested with caching
• [x] Have run makemessages recently, to ensure all translatable strings are in the .po files
• [x] Have added language selection functionality

Open questions

Site logo

We can either

• have multiple image assets and choose between them based on current language, or
• move to just the logo being an image, and the "Where Do I Vote?" text being actual text (which I think would be preferred)

We can also present both the English and non-English translations in the logo space if we'd prefer, with something like:

{% get_current_language as LANGUAGE_CODE %}
<img src={% static site_logo %}" alt="">
<span class="site-title-en">Where Do I Vote?</span>
{% if LANGUAGE_CODE != "en" %}
<span class="site-title-non-en">{% translate "Where Do I Vote?" %}</span>
{% endif %}

Council names

Do these need translating? I suspect we'd need another column on the council table for translations (probably a hstore for code→text pairs).

To source the translations, we could use this GOV.UK register, but it's about to be deprecated.

We could instead source alternative labels from Wikidata. This would involve:

• ensuring that each authority and associated administrative subdivision is present, and that the administrative subdivision has a matching ISO 3166-2 identifier
• ensuring that Welsh labels are present for all Welsh authorities, at a minimum
• developing a management command that queries Wikidata for the data we need and stores it in a fixture
• incorporating that fixture into our development and deployment processes

@chris48s mentioned something in #134 about place names in context, so we'd need to seek advice from a fluent speaker about how to approach this.

Making everything translatable

This may take some rephrasing work, so that the Welsh translations provide a good context for e.g. council names.

I've noticed that the directions processing doesn't do plurals right, so that may need some work.

Language selection

By default, Django pays attention to the Accept-Language header, so will respect the browser's language preferences.

We can also use the set_language redirect view to let a user select an alternative language explicitly. There would be some design work to work out how to present this? (e.g. a drop-down, or "English | Welsh" links in the corner).

[alexdutton]

(Because it's fun and after hours…) here's a first pass for a Wikidata SPARQL query for Welsh council names

The tricky bit will be differentiating authorities from other things that have jurisdiction over an administrative area. Would also need to restrict to things that are still extant.