Version française

[arlolra]

Hi,

This pull request is a work in progress. I've started adding internationalization to the codebase. What you wrote in the wiki sounds good. Hopefully I'll find the time to see this through.

I'm mainly posting so that you are aware of my intention to help out, and, in case you have objections, my efforts aren't in vain.

Arlo

[michaelmulley]

Hi Arlo,

This is great!

A few notes:

• As noted in the wiki, I'm reluctant to make openparliament.ca itself a multilingual site, just because that significantly increases my maintenance load. I'd much rather have someone else maintain a separate French site, running a separate database. But I'm happy to discuss this choice, and certainly happy to merge gettext calls and other similar changes into the main codebase.
• ... though I'm not gonna merge in this pull request, since that'd add rosetta as a dependency to the main code. But I don't think you particularly wanted me to do a merge at this point anyway.
• The "committees" branch contains a rewrite of the Hansard-import code (and some of the general transcript-viewing code). Don't bother working on anything in imports/hans on master; that will soon be dead code.
• If you get farther on the code side, I've had a couple people volunteer to do the actual translating. If you have a rosetta instance up and would like some help, I can put you in touch.
• Let me of any other way I can help!

[arlolra]

I removed the dependency on rosetta, which would only be needed on the separate site and, even then, only in development. I agree wholeheartedly that maintaining a multilingual site can introduce a lot of overhead, so keeping to different databases is probably best, though the same codebase can be used. The best tool I've found for model translation is django-hvad, but even that can be a lot of work.

I don't think there's any rush to merge this in, though at this point, there probably aren't any breaking changes. I've been running pep8 on the apps as I go through them. Making some changes helps me familiarize myself with your code. Hope that's alright.

The help you can provide is direction, encouragement and, when it comes time, translators and hosting.

[arlolra]

@rhymeswithcycle sorry I never finished this up. I touched too much code with pep8. Should have just stuck to adding internationalization support. I'm going to close for now and hopefully find time to restart.