Internationalization in Sakai

Speaker(s): Beth Kirschner, University of Michigan; Raul Mengod, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia; Vitaly Khudobakhshov & Anna Korsun, Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Session Abstract

Sakai continues to make progress in internationalization and localization. We will review the current progress, international institution issues, implementation decisions, and we will rank critical issues.. The panel will include implementors at UM (USA), UPV (Spain), and SCLAS (Russia), along with audience discussion.

Presentation Materials

Internationalization BOF

On Decemberr 5th, there was an Internationalization BOF ("birds of a feather") as a followup to this talk which continued the conversation on how to make the process of internationalization more accessible. Following are the notes.

Existing (Technical) Problems

SAK-8908 page and tool titles need to be internationalized dynamically (Raul/UPV and Tom/CRIM will post patches that represent a first pass solution patch posted)

Role names and site types are not localized (Tom/CRIM will post a patch to SAK-12397)

First day of the week needs to be dependent on locale (Raul/UPV): patch posted (SAK-8459) (resolved)

Message folders need to default to user's locale (Raul/UPV): (patch posted) (SAK-12146)

Date/Time widget needs to be developed for Velocity and JSF (SAK-7000). Beth will post an email to the dev list requesting help.

SAK-12299 and SAK-12300 describes problem of attaching unicode filenames to JSF tools. (patch posted for SAK-12299)

Floating point numbers representation not locale specific: JIRA tbd

CRIM has a patch that provides a locale-specific lookup for the Web Content tool, but this requires further evaluation for performance concerns (SAK-12396).

The FCK Editor might be modified to provide the option for creating locale-specific text, using a language attribute tag (SAK 12398).

Translating needs to be easier and more accessible

Everyone agrees that the current process for translating properties files is unreasonable and unmaintainable:

Creating a common properties file to remove redundancies (SAK-12351)

Outstanding issue: How to resolve the problem of matching properties key/value pairs to their context? (Beth will post question to sakai-dev list asking for suggestions).

One suggestion to assist the problem of out-of-context properties key/values is to update the ResourceLoader class with an option to log or otherwise annotate the relationship between a key/value property and it's context (SAK-12548).

Suggestion: The sakaiproject.org web site should leverage a WIKI to facilitate translations by international users, with a goal of more visible outreach to the international community. (Beth to follow up on this).

Help text will be localized in Sakai 2.5 (SAK-4256) – Tom/CRIM will send an email with details on how to use this new feature.

Higher level internationalization issues

Internationalization needs to become even more visible within the Sakai community and it's processes (QA, development, etc.)

Beth will send an email to the sakai-dev community with an update on the issues described here and remind developers of best practices for internationalization (with a link to the I18N confluence page). The (new) String Freeze date for the 2.5 release also needs to be determined and published.

Beth to ask if there are any resources the Sakai Foundation might be able to apply to help resolve some of the broader internationalization problems.