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

[Walter Bender]

Early on in the project, I had been discussing a system of i18n that
Red Hat was exploring that addressed many of the questions you have
been raising. (I don't remember what it is called, but it is
XML-based.) There is a nice overview of i18n here:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-i18n1.html

We may want to consider going beyond gettext in future releases,
although we'll have some issues with backward compatibility to content
with.

-walter

2009/6/23 Bryan Berry <bryan at olenepal.org>:
> 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
>
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-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org