Some ideas for Arabic translation of Drupal

I believe that there is still work to do on the translation, but here`s an example of an instance of Drupal in RTL.

The Afghan Peace & Democracy Act site

I'm working on a couple of english/arabic drupal pages.

the solution I'm using for the BIDI text direction problem is to make the theme scan the content and decide if the text should be RTL or LTR, this is not an efficient method but it works (you can see it @ http://www.eglug.org).

I think the best way to implement this though would be through a filter and not through the theme, this way you can calculate bidi on a paragraph by paragraph basis, and it gets cached (right?)

if I come up with a useable BIDI filter I'll add it to contrib.
----
http://www.manalaa.net

I started a Drupal Arabic translation project at Arabeyes.

Arabeyes is a Free/Open Source arabization meta project.

Will commit the translated files to the drupal contrib CVS when they're done.

http://www.manalaa.net

BiDi theme is now in CVS. (Thanks kbahey for committing the files)

The theme can be used for right-to-left locale sites (like Arabic),
or multi-lingual sites with one or more enabled right-to-left
locales.

In a related note, I made a presentation about Drupal in Arabic a while back, it's available for download at this link:
http://aymanh.com/download/scs-oct-2005.pdf

I'll contact Dries and see if he can add it to the marketing material.

--
Ayman Hourieh
http://aymanh.com/

I do not think modules / themes should be used for RTL handling. RTL should be handled at the core if drupal is realy serious about multilingual support. The following features could help.
1) Make i18n part of drupal core
2) Since i18n module allows to specify the language of each element, it should automatically handle RTL.
3) Allow dir="rtl" tag to be used in nodes. That will allow to embed RTL and LTR languages within the same node/page/book page. In RTL nodes, one would have to specify the LTR tag to overwrite the RTL node direction. In LTR nodes, an RTL tag would overwrite the LTR node direction.

Hi,

I'm sorry I totally forgot about uploading my work on the Arabic translation, here is my ar.po:
http://aymanh.com/download/ar.po.gz

It contains almost all of the user interface, and many parts of the admin interface, for core version 4.6 and some contrib modules.

I'll notify translation maintainers about this too, hopefully they can make some use of it.

--
Ayman Hourieh
http://aymanh.com/

Hi,
No doubt drupal is a great piece of work and the people behind it have done a great job and we are all thankful to them. However, being the first time to deal with it, I faced many problems regarding Arabic support. I, and another friend, Mugtaba, decided to lend a hand as a reward. We began with the translation of 4.7beta branch and almost finished it. Then we turned to the problem of RTL/BiDi and found the work of Ayman who has thankfully made his own bidi-theme. We thought about it carefully and found that Drupal has the flexibility to support RTL for all the themes out of the box with a trivial modifications to drupal files. So, instead of having themes for RTL which is different than the themes for LTR, we could easily patch all the themes to support both RTL and LTR.

The problem:
In RTL languages the direction should be set to be from right to left and hence everything on the page should be mirrored horizontally. Graphical arrows that point to the right, should now point to the left. Things that float right, should now float left. padding-left values, should go to padding-right values and vice versa. Other rules which are not direction oriented would remain the same.

The solution is to have a drupal_RTL.css file. I will shortly show an example of that file. This file should be loaded from common.inc in addition to drupal.css in case of RTL languages to override a few rules of the defaults.

This way drupal would support RTL language and mambo and zope/plone won't have an advantage over drupal on this issue ;).

// $Id: drupal_RTL.css, v 0.01 $
/* Override styles from drupal.css */

/*
** HTML elements
*/
table {
  direction: rtl;
}
th {
  text-align: right;
  padding-right: 0em;
  padding-left: 1em;
}

/*
** Menu styles
*/
ul.menu {
  text-align:right;
}
ul.menu li {
  margin: 0 0.5em 0 0;
}

//This rule uses a copy of the original image flipped horizontally.
li.collapsed {
  list-style-image: url('images/menu-collapsed-rtl.png');
}

I can send a complete file or put it in an issue

For now, temporary I put the logic into my own template.php like this

// $Id: template.php, v 0.01 $
/**
 * Catch and override the theme_stylesheet_import function from theme.inc
 */

function phptemplate_stylesheet_import($path, $media = 'all') {

// May be it's better to add a variable isRTL to locales_meta
// table so as not to hardcode the languages in the code
  $rtl = array("ar", "fa", "he", "ur", "yi"); // There are a couple or so more
  if (in_array(locale_initialize(), $rtl)) {
    if (file_exists(path_to_theme() . '/drupal_RTL.css')) {
      theme_add_style(path_to_theme() . '/drupal_RTL.css', $media);
    }
    if (file_exists(path_to_theme() . '/RTL.css')) {
      theme_add_style(path_to_theme() . '/RTL.css', $media);
    }
  }
  return theme_stylesheet_import($path, $media);
}

Which would work but would require an unnecessary step of duplicating this same file in all the themes directories.

When we make this clear in the documentation, the developers of the themes could make their design in a more or less symmetric way that doesn't even require a separate RTL.css file but when the need arises, the theme author or any one interested could very easily make that file available and official part of the theme. As an example, I quickly tested the theme fancy and here is a minimal file that works.

// $Id: RTL.css, v 0.01 $
/* Override styles from style.css */
#logo img {
  float: right;
}
#menu {
  text-align: left;
}
#primary-tabs {
  float: left;
}
.bleft {
  width: 10px;
}
.bleft-img {
  background: #ce5003 url(images/cr.png) no-repeat top right;
}
.bright-img {
  background: #ce5003 url(images/cl.png) no-repeat top right;
}

Hope this would help solve the problem in a neat way.

--
Munzir Taha
Telecommunications and Electronics Engineer
Maintainer of Fedora Arabic Translation Project
https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-trans-ar
Maintainer of the OpenBugs project page at
http://www.arabic-fedora.org/munzir/OpenBug

Hi,
I tried to introduce the two tags you recommended in my XML file but they did not work. I don't know exactly where and how to place them. Sorry........

The text is in Farsi and need to be RTL and right align.
My XML file is like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>>
<props>>
<txt1>Normal Text in English تحولی عظیم درروشهای آموزش زبان انگلیسی است.</txt1>
<txt2></txt2>
.
.
.
<txt25></txt25>
</props>

Please let me know if you can help.

excuse me my language (persian) is like arabic
i dont know how can i change the direction of the page
im new with drupal :(

--
www.persia-cms.com

FYI - I've added an issue to allow (+preliminary code) to allow RTL support in core. For the meanwhile - Support was added to i18n - but please help in moving this support to core and helping it become automatic.

I started a Drupal Arabic translation project ;)
____________________________
Insurance Center

We had to modify a theme to allow Arabic as well.

Here is what we put in the head of our page.tpl.php page to make it work.

 <style type="text/css">
.rtl { direction: rtl; unicode-bidi: embed; }
.ltr { direction: ltr; unicode-bidi: embed; }
<?php if (in_array($language, array('ar', 'fa', 'ur', 'he'))) {
echo 'body { direction: rtl; unicode-bidi: embed; }
p { direction: rtl; unicode-bidi: embed; }
#navigation a { text-align:right; }';
} ?>
</style> 

A further description can be found here:

http://openconcept.ca/blog/kevin/i18n/theme_changes/bidi

finally, i've found drupal arabic, at http://ifadah.net/drupal.. and i'm running it at one of my sites.