[Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Sugar Digest 2012-09-18

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 2012-09-24, at 01:40, James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org> wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 07:53:35PM -0300, Gonzalo Odiard wrote:
>> Paint activity was developed by a Brazilian team and a lot of variables
>> had Portuguese names.
>> Whit the time, we changed a lot, but there are a few pending.
> 
> It is irritating that we still store source code in linear text files
> without built-in internationalisation.
> 
> As you change these names, they become far less useful to programmers
> who use that language.
> 
> The development system would be more open and inclusive if there was a
> way to keep variable names, and other text, in multiple languages.
> 
> I've seen nothing yet that achieves this.  It would require editor
> application support.


Tile-based programming systems like Etoys, Scratch, or Turtle Art make this a lot easier. They at least support switching the names of built-in functions and objects.

Translating user-defined names is harder, but not impossible. I don't know of any deployment-ready system, but there have been at least demos, e.g. the 2004 TranSqueak project (details below, though I couldn't find a PDF online).

- Bert -

TranSqueak - making the world a smaller place: on-the-fly translation of Etoy projects and instant messaging

AUTHORS: Michael Rüger, Yoshiki Ohshima (Viewpoints Research Institute, Glendale, CA, USA)

PUBLISHED: Proceedings of Second International Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collaborating through Computing (C5), 2004.

ABSTRACT: This work presents an extension to the existing multilingualization work (ml7n) which allows people to collaborate on Squeak Etoy projects across different natural languages. Squeak etoys support several languages, both ISO-Latin based ones (erg., English, German, French), and nonISO languages (e.g., Japanese). Switching between languages for the Etoy tiles is fairly easy to support as the tiles provide a predefined set of words and phrases, which only need to be translated once. There are two areas where we need to go beyond the predefined and pretranslated set of phrases: user supplied names and communication between collaborators. This work presents an approach based on online translation services. We demonstrate a working prototype and a first analysis of the feasibility of this approach.