Problems in setting up a multilingual store

[mc12345678]

Thank you, the link was both useful for me and interesting!
After reading through it, I made some more corrections to the permissions: it appeared that both the Spanish and German languages had permissions set to 700 in several places where English had 755. So I changed the permission to match them with the English language. The Zen Cart itself was installed via cPanel and the additional language packages were added through gFTP - may-be that's why the permissions were different for different languages. And as I already had a minor issue seemingly due to this mismatch, I gave the same permissions to other languages as the English language has by default. I think it's safe - unless, of course, there is some permissions-linked issue with the ZC default installation itself (which, I think, is not very likely).

Anyway, I'm just learning now and will not start with the real shop very soon. So, if I make mistakes, I can learn from them without too much pain.

One more question: content of which folders have to be translated to an another language to have the front-end completely (including buttons) in this language? 'includes' and 'admin' - sure, but what else? The back-end translation is not important. The Spanish package has three folders (email, includes, admin), the Russian package has a lot more (but as I understand, not compatible with the v1.5.1). I would need both the Russian and Estonian languages in my future store as well...

Regarding the default installatiion and file/folder permissions, as ihungil commented, there are other "helpers" (documentation) that guide the store owner to properly apply security settings. I again, did not mention these because of thinking that they might be readily available or that only a refresher was needed. Just because the installer walks away with the settings as they are, does not mean that they are to remain that way after installation. From what little I reread about the link I most recently provided, it was indicated that eventually images should be taken down to I think it was 644 to prevent anything from over writing the images with another image. During setup, that would make things difficult because you would have to change the settings to change the image and then change again to "protect" it.

As a minor lesson learned of my own, file permissions may be different than folder permissions. I once made the mistake of making them both the same and had to get my host to restore some settings because I had made it to where I couldn't do what I was trying to do. I can't remember exactly what it was, but as I said a little bit of a lesson learned.

[robinast]

Regarding the default installatiion and file/folder permissions, as ihungil commented, there are other "helpers" (documentation) that guide the store owner to properly apply security settings. ...
As a minor lesson learned of my own, file permissions may be different than folder permissions.

Yes, I understood after reading the linked articles that folders usually should have permissions set to 777 or 755 and files to 644 or 444. Thus, I think I made a correct decision when setting permissions to 755 instead of 700 for some folders in the freshly added language packages. All files in them had 644 or 444, so I did not touch them. I think that leaving 700 for those folders would have started to make troubles for me sooner or later: already these flag icons that were in their proper places after installing the language packages did not show up on the front-end until I had changed the catalog permissions from 700 to 755. So I can only agree with the following:

Just because the installer walks away with the settings as they are, does not mean that they are to remain that way after installation.

[robinast]

Regarding the default installatiion and file/folder permissions, as ihungil commented, there are other "helpers" (documentation) that guide the store owner to properly apply security settings. ...
As a minor lesson learned of my own, file permissions may be different than folder permissions.

Yes, I understood after reading the linked articles that folders usually should have permissions set to 777 or 755 and files to 644 or 444. Thus, I think I made a correct decision when setting permissions to 755 instead of 700 for some folders in the freshly added language packages. All files in them had 644 or 444, so I did not touch them. I think that leaving 700 for those folders would have started to make troubles for me sooner or later: already these flag icons that were in their proper places after installing the language packages did not show up on the front-end until I had not changed the catalog permissions from 700 to 755. So I can only agree with the following:

Just because the installer walks away with the settings as they are, does not mean that they are to remain that way after installation.

[mc12345678]

Yes, I understood after reading the linked articles that folders usually should have permissions set to 777 or 755 and files to 644 or 444. Thus, I think I made a correct decision when setting permissions to 755 instead of 700 for some folders in the freshly added language packages. All files in them had 644 or 444, so I did not touch them. I think that leaving 700 for those folders would have started to make troubles for me sooner or later: already these flag icons that were in their proper places after installing the language packages did not show up on the front-end until I had not changed the catalog permissions from 700 to 755. So I can only agree with the following:

Well said! I can read between the lines as well. :)

As to your question about folder renaming, I don't know what it would take to work in the one or two languages you identified as being a problem, but the base folders stay named as they are, it's accounting for the languages in various locations that would need to be done. ZC has an override system that looks in specific places for things related to specific languages. I think the language packs that you have found or will find address the default ZC statements, but other plugins that you add to your cart may not. For those, either you will need to translate those additional statements or accept that they will more than likely only be available in english. This may affect how visitors interact with your site, so plan accordingly.

[robinast]

Yes, I guess so that to have Zen Cart in a new language is quite a lot of work... I have one running web store (Prestashop) now and it took me nearly 3 months to fight with the translation and tuning. The translation was partly done already and Prestashop also has a built-in translating system (or at least I think so; I struggled with the translation 3 years ago and do not remember exactly). A big trouble will be the buttons as well - remaking them must be very labour-intensive, I guess.

This way or another, I think nobody will do it for me - thus, if I do want the front-end to be in Estonian, it's me who has to translate. That's why asked what namely is to be translated for the front-end... The older Russian translation should be at least partly usable, so I expect not so much work with this. Thus, I'd be happy indeed to get to know what namely must be translated for the front-end.

[mc12345678]

Yes, I guess so that to have Zen Cart in a new language is quite a lot of work... I have one running web store (Prestashop) now and it took me nearly 3 months to fight with the translation and tuning. The translation was partly done already and Prestashop also has a built-in translating system (or at least I think so; I struggled with the translation 3 years ago and do not remember exactly). A big trouble will be the buttons as well - remaking them must be very labour-intensive, I guess.

This way or another, I think nobody will do it for me - thus, if I do want the front-end to be in Estonian, it's me who has to translate. That's why asked what namely is to be translated for the front-end... The older Russian translation should be at least partly usable, so I expect not so much work with this. Thus, I'd be happy indeed to get to know what namely must be translated for the front-end.

So, from that perspective, anything that has been developed with ZC's language system in mind can be identified as needing translation by looking through the languages directory. If I remember correctly (and I have not developed for alternate languages but do make effort to provide the possibility) all things language related are in that directory. So look at an image, if it has words, it probably needs translation. But in the case of many buttons (and depending on how the buttons are presented) the text identified elsewhere is overlain on the image.

As you read the statement(s) and wonder where they are used, use thhe admin developers toolkit to find the statement that is in all capital letters. The page(s)found are the ones that display that content and will have to figure out from the information around it the context of the statement to help with the translation. You might also then be able to test the page and see the results of your translation. Basically though, you could copy the contents of english to another language and then begin translation from that folder with the new language active.

If I find otherwise, I'll be sure to say something. Perhaps another reviewer of this thread has some more input?