Silva Translations on Launchpad

31 october 2005 – As some of you may know Silva has been internationalized for a while now, meaning that it is possible to have the whole user interface in any language at all. Of course this is only useful to people when actual translations for their preferred languages are offered. Some excellent work has already been done for a few languages such as Dutch, German, French, Chinese, and Hebrew, but usually by one enthusiastic person, or by us, and making a translation and keeping it up to date is a lot of work. Also the ‘user-friendliness’ of the tools available usually meant that only technical people would work on translations, while this is of course one of those areas where you don't have to be a total geek to help out.

It would be nice if that work could be distributed over many people, making the translations less work, and having them end up with a higher quality, since many people get a look at them. Thanks to Launchpad (http://launchpad.net/) that is now possible. We have our own Silva translations page there, where anyone can work on existing translations, one string at a time.

I have actually used the Launchpad translation tool (called Rosetta) already for contributing a little to the Dutch translations of SchoolBell and Zope3, and I must say I'm impressed with what it does, and more features seem to be on the way.

Anyone with a few spare moments is invited to register on launchpad and help out on one of the existing translations, or suggest a new language, which I will then add. We are probably also looking for semi-official translation 'managers' for each language, for streamlining communication basically.

If there are any questions, mail the silva mailing list and I’ll answer them on or off list.

Note that there are still some UI problems to be solved with non-latin character sets such as hebrew and arabic for instance, because the silva page templates do not yet have any way to display themselves from right to left instead of the other way around, but this is being contemplated deeply (meaning: no, we haven't done any work on that yet, no.)

And now, ladies and gentlemen, your attention please, for the first time in history, much anticipated, I give you:

The Silva Launchpad page

Contact: Eric Casteleijn, eric at infrae com