In the Dark Ages it used to be common practice to kill the bearer of bad news. That was long before WordPress and Gengo, and no translator on this site has to fear such consequences when being mistaken for the post author. Nonetheless, this distinction is still of some importance in collaborative blogs, I think.

I? Who’s that? If you’re lucky enough to be reading this post in English or German you can see my name right on top of this article. If not, chances are that the translator pretends to be the post author.

On the other hand, s/he would be right in arguing that translating is no less a copyright protected work which deserves being given credits.

Publishing Date

Not only are there two copyright holders, there are also two publishing dates.

Obviously, the more relevant one in most cases will be the date of the original version. (Take this text, for example: It will be outdated when my suggestions will be implemented in a few weeks or months, before all translations have been made available yet.) Secondly, on a blog it would be more convenient to have the posts listed chronologically, even if they haven’t been translated in that order.

On the downside, this would mean that some freshly translated articles would find their way directly into the blog archive.

Of course we want to see both names and both dates in the meta section. However, only one can appear under the “posted by/on” variable respectively, while the other one needs a new field. Basically, there are two solutions that I can think of:

Solution 1: Retrieve Author’s Name

Posted by [the translator’s name]. In addition, Gengo retrieves gengo_original_author() and gengo_original_date() from the original post. This can be done “on the fly”, dynamically, requiring extra database queries every time an article is being read. For new articles, author and translator would be identical, which is not a good thing either.

Solution 2: Retain Author’s Name

I believe, the_author() should always show the author of the original version. Translators then appear under gengo_translator(). When a post or page is being marked as a translation, Gengo automatically selects the author’s name and fills in the correct date. The current user’s name is automatically chosen from a second drop-down menu marked “translator”. In original posts gengo_translator() remains empty.

What it would look like

Blog owners could incorporate something like this into their templates:

<div class="meta">
First published in <?php gengo_original_language() ?> by <?php the_author() ?> on <?php the_time('Y-m-j') ?>,
translated by <?php gengo_translator() ?> on <?php gengo_time('Y-m-j') ?>
…
</div>

This is what we would get:

First published in English by Georg on 2007-02-01,
translated by User123 on 2007-02-03.
Filed under: Development News, Site News, Gengo, Technical.
  • Add links and make it localizable.
  • Use conditional display for the second line, preventing it from being visible in original posts.
  • In user profiles we could show a list of “all articles”/“all translations by [user]”.

These are some of my ideas for future releases of Gengo. But for the time being we need to change the author’s name manually. Shouldn’t we? Please share your opinion and leave a comment!

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