[WG: I18N & L10N] How to i18n sakai tools

Wed Jan 4 12:28:14 PST 2012

Hi Gao,

I agree with you in each word you've written. :)

The issues with roles is that they are institution dependent. For example, at Universitat Polit¨¨cnica de Val¨¨ncia we don't use instructor neither student. Instead we use profesor & alumno. What you can find at default installation are default roles. There is no need for you to use default roles: you can use your own roles instead. But...one thing is role name and other thing is role description. Currently, there is no way of providing i18ned description for roles...and I cannot see a absolute generic solution for this. During role creation, you are asked to provide role description in one language. As the description is institution-dependent and, potentially, can whichever text, you cannot make automatic translation easily a priori (using a Google Web Service or similar?). However, if you happen to have a solution, I'd be glad to explore it and, if this is the case, to commit it into Sakai. What your are proposing seems reasonable to me but, from my point of view, has one pitfall: you cannot define roles dinamically. As sakai.properties are read during startup you would need to restart your Sakai to read new roles description. :-\

Relating to emails. We have the same  problem. In fact, I also would like to see this fixed. :( ETS it is supposed to be the standard way of sending emails but, to be sincere, not all Sakai tools are currently using it and projects teams have other priorities so I'm not foreseeing a sooner solution to this.  I also don't know which is the ETS roadmap. Probably, sakai-dev would be the right place to ask.

Thanks a lot for your answer. And, please, if you are really interested in working at i18n (no matter if developing, testing or however), just let us know. Any help will be highly appreciated.

Best,
   David

________________________________________
De: i18n-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [i18n-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] En nombre de ¸ß¬B [gaojun at fudan.edu.cn]
Enviado el: mi¨¦rcoles, 04 de enero de 2012 14:39
Para: i18n at collab.sakaiproject.org
Asunto: Re: [WG: I18N & L10N] How to i18n sakai tools

Hi David,

    Well, in Fudan University, we have tried a lot to translate Sakai to Chinese. The most annoying i18n issues are roles' names and email.

    As you know, after the initial audo-ddl, some roles like Instructor, Teaching Assistent, Student, Maintain, Access would be created automatically. And these strings would be shown in the Site Info tool and the privilege page of many other tools. These role names are stored in database, and can not be shown in other languages.
    I think it's better to add some properties to a shared properties file to solve this issue.

For example:
role.instructor=Instructor
role.teaching_assistent=Teaching Assistent
role.student=Student

    When role name is displayed on a page, Sakai may first find it in the properties file for key role.ROLE_NAME("all to lower case and replace "space" by "_" for comptibility, like "role.teaching_assistent" for "Teaching Assistent"), if the key in missing, then show the role name in the database (for customized role).
    I once planned to do these things in our code this winter, but it would be much better if the i18n team could give a guide line or a principle of where to put the properties file and how the tools read them.

    And next is the email. Sakai is combined by many tools, and the tools were contributed by many people. The methods to send emails are different from each other,  and unfortunately many tools didn't put i18n in their consideration. When an email is sent in non-latin language, it would be unreadable. We have to disable the email function in our school. The Email Template Service is a good start, but it's not enough yet. Is there any plan or roadmap to make all the tools be sent email by Email Template Service?

                Hi all,

                Miguel Carro from Samoo and me are reviewing i18n at Sakai trunk and have found some basic bad practices, like hardcoding strings (https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/site-manage/trunk/site-manage-tool/tool/src/webapp/vm/sitesetup/chef_site-siteInfo-list.vm). I would like to encourage you to ask at i18n list if you have problems with i18n. For us, it will be a pleasure to help you or guide you in dealing with that kind of issues. Anyway, to help the community to deal with this we created i18n School at Confluence, which can be found at https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/I18N/i18n+School, where you¡¯ll find short and practical tutorials about how to fix this kind of problems. Of course, contributions/suggestions/whatever will be welcome. Just let us know.

                Thank you very much in advance.

                Best,
Dr. David Rold¨¢n Mart¨ªnez
Universitat Polit¨¨cnica de Val¨¨ncia, Spain
Sakai CLE QA lead for Internationalization
[cid:part1.07060507.07090105 at fudan.edu.cn]

[cid:part2.03050500.07070608 at fudan.edu.cn]

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--
Gao Jun
Fudan University
China