ATutor

Multilingual questions

• pfunke
  

  2008-10-01 16:33:40

  Multilingual questions

  Hi,
  I just installed your application and have been playing with it to find out if it's suitable for our project.
  
  I have activated a second language (french) in the app but noticed that the questions i create in courses don't have the option of entering the question and answers in french and english, only one language (whatever language i type in actualy).
  
  This makes it awkward to create a multilingual course site if only the interface changes language (when i click on the 'translate to' links) but not the course questions! Is there a way around this or a feature coming up?
  
  Thanks

• greg
  

  2008-10-01 16:47:14

  Re: Multilingual questions

  There isn't an option to switch between question languages, though you could create two versions of the test, and if you know which users are French, assign them and the french test to a group. Same for the English user, or whatever languages they might prefer. Or just create two test and have people choose one.
  
  I'm not aware of a system that switches question languages when the system language changes, so you may need to adapt something to produce that functionality.

• vegard
  

  2008-10-02 02:59:44

  Re: Multilingual questions

  we're solving that with creating two different courses, say one with French content and tests and one with English content and test. In addition we force a language on these so the interface cannot be translated at all, see:
  
  http://www.atutor.no/2008/07/why-force-language-and-how
  
  to create a true multilingual system is very hard work and also makes the GUI for admins way more complex. You also run into a lot of non-technical issues in the translation, where it's often not as easy as one would think to do a 1:1 translation. some content should not be translated, things needs to be added in some, removed in some, and you need fallbacks mechanisms for that etc etc etc.
  
  I'm familiar with this from the technical side after working with Drupal (which can be truly multilingual), and after creating a few multilingal websites over the years. for ATutor it is probably not worth going down this path for quite some time..