[Server-devel] Translating Moodle - a sustainable approach...?

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

Hi Martin,
Apologies for the delayed response.

On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 7:17 AM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Sayamindu,
>
> I am preparing a Moodle package for the XS and looking a bit into
> localisation strategies. Looks like Moodle and the XS software in
> general is going to be rather different from the laptop sw
> translation.
>
> For this release of the XS I am going to not worry too much about
> translations and focus -- it is a 'milestone' release, and I can
> coordinate with local teams how to install the localisation packages
> separately. For the next release (xs-0.6) I'd like to have a
> sustainable approach.
>
> In this email I will focus on Moodle, as a custom version of it will
> be the main "UI" of the XS. Mediawiki - another large app I am
> planning on packaging for the XS - has mostly the same issues around
> l10n/i18n.
>
> The Pootle approach - while good for Sugar apps, has several issues
> for the XS software:
>
>  - gettext has technical and performance problems running in
> webservers -- part of the problem may have to do with how the
> PHP-gettext extension is written - however, this problem has been with
> us for a long time, and it is unlikely to be fixed in the short term.
> Moodle and Mediawiki both use custom systems for their strings. No
> successful PHP webapp I am aware of uses gettext :-/
>
>  - These custom systems have slightly different ways of handling
> string interpolation and plurals
>
>  - Moodle has a large number of strings - ~10K (MW is smaller, I think)
>
>  - Moodle has an active community in many languages, and an active
> translation team. Of course, not all translations have good
> coverage...
>
>  - We will be customising Moodle extensively, so we'll want to
> override some strings, as well as add our own strings.
>
> It's also interesting to note that Moodle ships with its own "strings
> editor" to make it easy to maintain translations (and contribute them)
> :-) -- I guess it's what you have to do when you can't use pootle!
>
> So my thinking at the moment is as follows...
>
> - Get translators involved upstream, and contributing to the core
> translation. As part of this, make it easy for them to use a vanilla
> (unpatched) moodle, and give them some guidance as to what parts of
> moodle we actually use so that they can choose to focus if their time
> is (understandably) short.
>
> - Give translators access to a custom moodle that
>  - shows the modified pages (with a some notes as to where to focus
> their attention)
>  - grabs translation updates from upstream often (or can be told to
> fetch them 'now')
>  - lets them edit the overrides
>
> All of this is naturally quite a bit of work to implement and to
> maintain over time. Moodle has a lot of surface (lots of UIs, pages,
> buttons, functionality) -- so this is a large task. However, I think
> it is valuable as it will be the "face" of the school server that
> users experience.
>
> (Of course, the XS has many other services for the XOs but most of
> them are "transparent" to the user.)
>


One of the issues I see here is the relative difficulty in pushing
translator upstream. I won't be a problem for active languages like
Spanish, Turkish, etc, but for languages like Pashto, etc, which have
very few people translating, are even lesser number of people with
proper (if any) internet access, it is going to be a problem. However,
as you say, it might be actually _worth_ the effort :-).

On the other hand, Pootle actually handles a large number of project
which are non-gettext based - in fact, we are the only large userbase
of Pootle who use gettext and PO files. The other two large projects
using Pootle are Mozilla and OpenOffice.org, which have their own i18n
framework. I was wondering in that case, would it be possible for
Moodle to publish/export translations files, which would essentially
be a set of any kind of key-value pairs - even plain old CSV would do.
If we can do that, I'm sure that we can come up with a workflow which
would let people use Pootle to translate the custom version of Moodle
for the XS.
Do you think that makes sense ?
Thanks,
Sayamindu



-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]