History: TranslationUnit

Translation Unit is an abstract concept used to distinguish the translation process as dealt with by the translation manager from the concrete translation job as perceived by the translator.

A translation unit is basically something that you deem ready for publication or not. It will most often be a series of translators' works, like a group of pages, a structure, a category, a directory... But it can also be smaller than a particular work of one translator, for instance just one word for a precise menu link in a translation job containing many menu lines to translate. It can also correspond exactly to one translator's job, like a self-sufficient wiki page.

When you run a multilingual site, it often occurrs that all translations are not ready at the same time for all languages. On many sites it will be considered unaesthetic or impractical to publish - for instance a structure - that is only partially translated and therefore much less good than the original. Or you can also estimate that it makes no sense at all publishing this particular thing that is not complete, and when you perceive this particular thing as non-sensical if translated only partially, that is precisely when you can call it a translation unit.

The most obvious example of non-sensical translation is a partially translated single wiki page, if missing sentences make the text irrelevant, like:

- Source language: "I was a ski instructor. Now I teach Judo to children."

- Target language: "I was a ski instructor."

But for many reasons, including diplomatic reasons between national groups, it is whole groups of translations that you can prevent from publication until they are not complete.

How this translation unit concept can be best applied to TikiWiki multilingual development remains to be defined. However the most important thing to remember is that it should be applicable to any kind of object, not only text but for instance modules, etc. Please feel free to improve this page.