Internationalization (I18N) & Localization (L10N)

The activities of the Sakai I18N and L10N Working Group are being conducted on Collab in the WG: I18N & L10N site. Internationalization discussions are conducted on the I18N mail list. Additional information on internationalization and localization is posted in this space. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) - Answers to frequently asked questions How to Translate Sakai - Tools and information for translators Subversion Commit Privilege - Commit procedure for those with Subversion Commit Privilege Best Practices for Internationalized Tools in Sakai - Best practices and information for tool developers Common UTF-8 Problems - Help with common configuration problems I18N Meetings & Top Problems - Conference meetings and high priority I18N bugs from JIRA Right-to-Left Localization - Help configuring Sakai skins for a right-to-left orientation (e.g. Hebrew, Arabic)

Contents

• Overview
• Internationalization Status
• Internationalization Tools

Overview

The Internationalization Working Group (WG) is focused on supporting Internationalization (I18N) and Localization (L10N) in Sakai.

Internationalization Status

At the time of this writing, the following languages/locales are at least partially supported: English (US & UK), Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Spanish, French (France & Canada), Catalan, Swedish, Arabic, Russian, Portuguese (Portugal & Brazil) and Basque. Nightly updated reports on the internationalization status of Sakai are available on the Internationalization Dashboard (developer documentation available on Confluence).

Additionally, there are several aspects of internationalizing Sakai:

1) Ability to type international (unicode) characters into any Sakai tool
Status: Currently supported

2) Ability for any tool interface to dynamically reflect a user's preferred international locale
Status: Supported pending translation

3) Ability to create worksites whose page titles will statically reflect to a defined international locale
Status: Supported pending translation

4) Ability to create worksites whose page titles will dynamically reflect a user's preferred international locale
Status: Not supported yet (pending development)

5) Ability to create worksites whose page titles and tool interface will statically reflect a site's preferred international locale
Status: Not supported yet (pending development)

6) Ability to support right-to-left languages
Status: Supported pending customized skins or CSS (see Sakai-RTL-skin.jpg)

Internationalization Tools

ResourceProperties Editor

The ResourceProperties Editor is a platform-independent, stand-alone tool which supports editing and translating properties files. Its available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/i18nedit with documentation at http://i18nedit.sourceforge.net/userdoc/. This editor keeps track of changes, additions, and deletions to the default bundle, allowing translations to easily be kept up to date. UTF-8 characters can be typed directly into the editor, and they will be automatically asci-encoded when the file is saved.

PropertyTransferer Utility

PropertyTransferer is a GUI utility from Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (St. Petersburg, Russia) to transfer property values from one property list to another, for updating localization files to the newer version. The latest version is available as a web-based tool at http://pt.smolny.nw.ru/ (the source is also available from https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/tools/i18n/property-transfer/).

XLIFF Translation Editor

The XLIFF Translation Editor is a platform-independent, stand-alone tool which supports editing and translating a wide variety of file types. While it doesn't track changes like the ResourceProperties Editor, it does provide many other features which makes it a powerful tool for translating help pages and other HTML-based pages within Sakai.

Transformable and PreferAble

The University of Toronto has developed a preferences tool that allows users to configure a personal stylesheet, which, for example, would allow users with a language preference such as Arabic or Hebrew to use a right-to-left stylesheet or skin.

More information is at http://transformable.atrc.utoronto.ca/