Internationalization and Localization (GSoC 2011)

Student: EricFeng
Mentors: BruceKorb, HarlanStenn
GSoC: GSoC Project Page

Summary

The goal of this project:

1. NTP utilities' i18n support, all programs in NTP will be ready to localization, that's, if we want NTP to support a new language, we won't need to change the program any more;

2. clear and simple data interface for localization, that is, a well arranged string list which covers the programs' output and man page and web pages, with as less redundancy as possible;

3. at least two language(non-English)'s localization of the above data; one is Chinese(my native language), the other will be selected after the goal 2 is done; I choose two here just for better testing goal 1 and goal 2;

Related Items:

Timeline

Date	Task	Description
2011-04-25		Accepted student proposals announced on the Google Summer of Code 2011 site.
2011-04-27	discussion and planning	communicate with mentors/ntp developers, to fix the project border and plan.
2011-05-07	prepare the data to translate	extract all the strings in the program, and classify them according to some priority. we will know which must/need to/no need to be localized, the following work and all localizations will benefit from the result of this step;
2011-05-24	Start i18n work	determine the i18n solution for NTP. if we don't want to import depency to other libraries, design a new translation engine for NTP; part of the coding works;
2011-06-07	code change	do most of the code change work; I would be busy with my final examination of this semester during this period(the exact date is still unknown now) :(
2011-06-21	finish goal 1	finish the code change, and test the change carefully. after this week, the goal 1 should be done
2011-06-28	start localization	collect the documents to be translated, start to localize the strings collected from program before, submit mid-term report
2011-07-15	Mid-term evaluations	Mid-term evaluations deadline
2011-07-15	finish program's Chinese l10n work	the goal 2 would be done before now, continue my localization work, and invite some one to do the localization for another language; after this period, the program's Chinese localization should be done.
2011-07-26	document translation	test and adjust the localization work; translate the documents; get the result of the localization of the other language.
2011-08-15	Wrap-up	Suggested 'pencils down' date. Take a week to scrub code, write tests, improve documentation, etc.
2011-08-15	Wrap-up	finish the translation work, test previous i18n work with the two languages' l10n data
2011-08-22	Firm 'pencils down' date.	Mentors, students and organization administrators can begin submitting final evaluations to Google.
2011-08-26	Final evaluation	Final evaluation deadline
2011-08-30	Code samples	Students can begin submitting required code samples to Google

Discussion and Comments

Possible Implementation Ideas

Right now, we might have something like:

doc-section     = { 
  ds-type       = 'USAGE'; 
  ds-format     = 'mdoc'; 
  ds-text       = <<-  _END_MDOC_USAGE 
blah 
        _END_MDOC_USAGE; 
};

How should we handle different languages with this?

Would ds-text- be a good choice?

We could put the languages one after another:

doc-section     = { 
  ds-type       = 'USAGE'; 
  ds-format     = 'mdoc'; 
  ds-text       = <<-  _END_MDOC_USAGE 
blah 
        _END_MDOC_USAGE; 
  ds-text-zh_CN.GB2312 = <<-  _END_MDOC_USAGE 
blah 
        _END_MDOC_USAGE; 
};

Or we could try a #include syntax:

doc-section     = { 
  ds-type       = 'USAGE'; 
  ds-format     = 'mdoc'; 
  #include ds-text-$LC_AGEN.usage
};

where ds-text-zh_CN.GB2312.usage might contain

ds-text-zh_CN.GB2312 = <<-  _END_MDOC_USAGE 
blah 
        _END_MDOC_USAGE;

Harlan notes that some might prefer #include ds-text-usage.$LC_AGEN instead, and that's fine - it's a "policy" choice, and he is interested in making sure we have a good "mechanism" here.

autogen might treat $LC_AGEN as slightly magical - if no value for $LG_AGEN is specified, we might see if there is a value for $LC_ALL (for example) and use that instead. And it should not be a fatal error if the requested "translation file" does not exist; in that case the base ds-text stanza would be used.

Naming Output Files

Some folks will want to generate more than 1 (likely all) locale's worth of output files. This will probably require a for loop in the Makefile.am and we will need to choose a naming convention for the generated files. We may also want a way to install a subset of these files.

Comments

i18nexample.tar: i18n example

Attachments

Topic attachments
I	Attachment	Action	Size	Date	Who	Comment
tar	i18nexample.tar	manage	20.0 K	2011-05-21 - 18:15	EricFeng	i18n example

This topic: Dev > WebHome > GoogleSummerOfCode > GSoC2011InternationalizationAndLocalization
Topic revision: r5 - 2011-05-21 - 18:15:41 - EricFeng