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. Additional information on internationalization and localization is posted in this space. How to Translate Sakai - Tools and information for translators Subversion Commit Privilege - Commit procedure for those with Subversion Commit Privilege How to write 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

Contents

• Internationalization Status
• How to Enable A Specific Language and Locale
• Internationalization Tools

Internationalization Status

At the time of this writing, the following languages/locales are supported: English (US & UK), Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, French (France & Canada), Catalan, Swedish, Arabic, Russian, Portuguese (Portugal & Brazil). 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)

How to Enable A Specific Language and Locale

Currently supported languages/locales are defined in the sakai.properties file. A good reference for language/locale settings is at http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/intl/locale.doc.html.

After the process of localization has been completed, there are two options for displaying the translated interface within Sakai:

1. You can define the default language/locale when starting Sakai by setting user.language and user.region
   • If Sakai is running on a Windows machine, you should define these variables in the batch file used to start tomcat. For example, inserting the following line into the catalina.bat file (below the comment "rem ----- Execute the Requested Command") will define Spanish/Spain as the default language/locale:

     set JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -Duser.language=es -Duser.region=ES

   • If Sakai is running on a Linux or Unix machine, you should define these variables in the shell script used to start tomcat. For example, inserting the following line into the catalina.sh file (below the comment "# ----- Execute the Requested Command") will define Spanish/Spain as the default language/locale:

     JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Duser.language=es -Duser.region=ES"

2. Individual users can enable a supported language/locale using the Preferences Tool and selecting the Language option (click image to enlarge):

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/