taxonomy and multilingual content

Hi again,

thanks for your comments. I think this problem touches on an important issue in multilingual website development. In this case, it seems that the taxonomy was developed as fundamentally language-independent, which makes sense because concepts (which is what the taxonomy is, really) are not dependent on language.

However, the taxonomy system forces us to identify concepts with strings, which must be in a given language. For example, I could call my Recycling concept "recycling (recyclage)", but what if I have twenty different languages?

However, how to assign language-dependent strings to language-independent concepts. (For example, having the concept "recycling-concept", the string "recycling" related to this concept for English-speaking authors and the string "Recyclage" related to this concept for French speaking authors). Both Recyclage and Recycling could have "recycling-concept" as a parent. Only "recycling-concept" would display all nodes of all languages (which in the real world nobody would ever do, I think). This makes things clunky for the authors of articles, I think. Again, in an environment with fifteen or twenty languages, I did not find any way of allowing only "French" concepts to apply to French-language posts (all taxonomy terms can apply to all posts).

Another problem with the foregoing approach: Recyclage cannot be described as the french equivalent of Recycling, which messes up automatic menu translation, which is a cool feature in Drupal.

The basic shortcoming, it seems to me (again, I am a Drupal novice so I might be missing something), is that Taxonomy was not designed as multilingual from the get go.

Anyway, I find that the default behavior has some internal logic but to me is counter-intuitive. For the novice that I am, the simplest way to deal with this is to give my concepts (taxonomy terms) english names (and hope my international authors understand english), and then to tweak the taxonomy module as follows (Anti could probably tweak the blog module in the same manner):

in modules/taxonomy/taxonomy.module,

function taxonomy_select_nodes($tids = array(), $operator = 'or', $depth = 0, $pager = TRUE, $order = 'n.sticky DESC, n.created DESC') {

/* begin modification -- this modification added to allow the taxonomy module to display only posts in the current language or posts which are language-independent. Posts in a language other than the current language will not be displayed. Note that for this to work, you must add the variable $theLangDepWheres after all WHERE commands in the SELECT clauses within this function, for example ...WHERE tn.tid... should become ...WHERE'.$theLangDepWheres.'tn.tid IN...   */

	$theSelectOnlyCurrentLangFlag = true; 
	// set to false to keep the original (6.x) behaviour. Setting this to true will eliminate, in a list generated by /taxonomy/term/x, posts which are explicitely in a language different from the current language

	global $language; // the global language object
	$theLocale = $language->language; // the locale will now hold the current language as a two-letter abbreviation, for example en or fr

	if($theSelectOnlyCurrentLangFlag) {
	
		$theLangDepWheres = " (n.language = '$theLocale' OR n.language = '') AND "; 
		// add this variable after WHERE in the following SELECT clauses.
	
	}

/* end modification */

Thanks again for your replies,

Albert.