What is a good replacment pattern for url aliases that use Kanji and hiragana (Japanese)

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
beckyjohnson's picture

For my Japanese site i wanted to to auto path aliasing and I had for example the pattern about/[title-raw]
But then that would result in a url like this ja/about/日本オフィスについて. But the thing is, more urls on in foreign languages are still in english. I checked on some japanese websites I found. So what is a good replacement pattern that will work for japanese and still have a meaningful url aliasing. doing a node id might work but I like having the title there. What else could I do?

Thanks,
Becky

Comments

Manual translation of menues/taxonomy

Frank Ralf's picture

Hi Becky,

That's an interesting question. I will look into it. If you want meaningful URLs I suppose you have to translate and provide them manually.

Of the top of my head: The Translation Table module might help with that (http://drupal.org/project/translation_table). You could translate taxonomy key terms from the postings and combine those with the node id to get unique path names.

hth
Frank

PS
Have you tried the Transliteration module (http://drupal.org/project/transliteration) mentioned on the Pathauto page? However, according to the documentation "sometimes the output is very dirty: [it] does quite badly on Japanese and Thai."

PPS
- Pathauto tutorial: http://tips.webdesign10.com/drupal-pathauto
- Building a transliteration file: http://drupal.org/node/185664
- Transliteration for Japan: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2008/10/transliteration-for-japan.html
- Need Japanese transliteration: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071214182418AAsqByA

Faulty Japanese transliteration

Frank Ralf's picture

I fear Shaun is right. Japanese is not very well suited for transliteration.

I have tried Pathauto 6.x-2.x-dev (http://drupal.org/node/273527) on my development machine and it transliterated "日本語のテキスト" to "i-ben-yu-notekisuto". You see that kana is no problem but kanji is.

hth
Frank

If it was just hiragana and katakana

Dokuro's picture

If it was just hiragana and katakana then it would be no problem, but like so many other things in Japan. There is a way of complicating the simple. Kanji, while it looks cool to the outsider, man, just think of all we could do without it. I could pick up any book and read it straight through!

Anyways, kanji is the killer.

It's not really that much more work to just type the romaji in for the url or just you taxonomy and nid for it. Having Japanese in the url is just not a very good thing to do.

Unless anyone has some miracle fix...I don't

Regards,

Shaun

Auto Translation With Japanese

Dokuro's picture

I don't think you are going to find a good solution for Japanese and auto translation of titles for the url. I stopped using path-auto for Japanese sites. The combination of different Kanji, you will have a hard time getting anything to give you a good reading. There are often multiple readings for just one word.

Also, making a url with Kanji/hiragana/katakana in it, makes it a pain to type in the future. When I make drupal sites for Japan, I just have them use the romaji for the url field.

Hope that helps,

Shaun

Thank you for the advice

beckyjohnson's picture

Thank you for the advice guys. I'm going to look into the modules you mentioned Frank, because they might be helpful for other languages but mainly after a day of experimentation on this, I'm going to ditch path auto for the Japanese site and put everything in manually in English. It seems like a lot of Japanese websites have their urls in english anyway. I already talked to my boss about using Romaji and he didn't want to complicate it with that.

Thanks for the great feed back though! The only place to lean this kind of stuff is on the forums and not in drupal books, for sure.

Becky

Path-auto

Dokuro's picture

I have since started using Path auto again for Japanese sites.

It was really quite simple. If you make a CCK field that is something like: Romaji URL or something, and make it mandatory for them to fill in with help text explaining that you must use Romain characters. Then you can use path-auto to pull in that CCK field. This works really well instead of letting people un-check the auto fill, because when they come back to edit things, the auto fill check box gets checked again, and if they forget, your URL from before will be deleted and changed. Having it set to the CCK field solves that issue well.

Hope that helps people.

Hi, How do we create a CCK

56rosa's picture

Hi,

How do we create a CCK field? I want some Japanese in the URL.

I don't know how to have some

56rosa's picture

I don't know how to have some Japanese in the URL. I'm leaving all in English for the URL.

Sorry for the delay!

Internationalization

Group organizers

Group categories

Group notifications

This group offers an RSS feed. Or subscribe to these personalized, sitewide feeds: