[Sugar-devel] Some initial thoughts on i18n for Karma

[Bryan Berry]

On Tue, 2009-06-23 at 14:57 +0530, Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:
> The above layout looks fine to me. I think it should be quite easy to
> load <LANGCODE>/audiofile.ogg when you have the langcode.
> There is a somewhat undocumented algorithm to figure out fallback
> locale (eg: if locale is ne_NP, look inside ne_NP, if not found, look
> inside ne, and so on)
> Many years back, I wrote a hackish Python script to do it:
> http://sayamindu.randomink.org/misc/get_language_names4.pytxt

what do u think about my suggestion that we put LANGCODE in the file
name? We have a huge archive of audio files at the OLE office and it is
a major pain to differentiate b/w the Nepali audio files and the English
audio files.


so how about naming convention for the audio files
langCode_htmlElementId.ogg   ?


> Producing the audio files is going to be another issue. Pootle won't
> be useful here - if we want to use the existing "crowdsourcing"
> approach, we might have to develop a custom webapp (or extend Pootle)
> to take in and handle audio files.

I would really, really like to crowdsource audio. Short audio snippets
are really essential to language learning. We have also found that our
kids really like audio feedback during exercises. 


> Take a look at the javascript implementation of gettext:
> http://jsgettext.berlios.de/doc/html/Gettext.html
> Does it solve some of your problems ?

Will read through and the let u know 

> > 2) What are some pitfalls I haven’t thought of?
> > 3) How could we ensure dynamically generated numbers are presented in
> > the locale without making the programmer’s job too hard?
> >
> 
> You mean native digits for numerals like ०१२३४... ? 

Yes 

> glibc 2.2 and
> above has a flag character called I - so if you do printf ("%Id",
> ...), it will give you the locale specific digit. I'm not sure if this
> is available anywhere else though (Python does not have it - though I
> have some ideas about implementing it)

jquery.i18n utility seems to perform this service
http://code.google.com/p/jquery-utils/wiki/I18N

> > And a request: Pls, pls direct me to great i18n resources and guides. If
> > there is already an established standard for this, I will be happy to
> > copy it.
> >

> The gettext manual is the best place to begin work:
> http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html

tks, i will definitely read thru that

tks for all your help Sayamindu in this and many previous instances !

-- 
Bryan W. Berry
Technology Director
OLE Nepal, http://www.olenepal.org