Living in a Multi-lingual World: Internationalization in Web and Desktop Applications

i18n for Web 2.0
Why and how to internationalize your Web 2.0
application

Lars Trieloff, Mindquarry

Why internationalize?
International audiences want localized user interfaces.

Lars Trieloff
• Entrepreneur, Blogger,
Open Source Coder

• Languages I understand:

• German, English

• Languages I do not
understand:

• Mandarin, Hindi,
Spanish, Arabic, Russian,
Portuguese, Bengali, Malay,
French, Japanese, Farsi, Urdu,
Punjabi, Vietnamese, Tamil, Wu, Javanese,
Turkish, Telugu, Korean, Marathi, Italian, Thai, cantonese, gujarati, polish,
kannada, burmese (and all other)

Do it yourself, or someone else
will do it

What is different in
Web 2.0
internationalization?

Web 2.0
internationalization
• Web sites become Web applications

• The Web as a platform

• This means:

• Internationalize your plain old Web site

• Internationalize your rich internet applications

• Javascript, Flash, Silverlight, and more to come

• Internationalize your desktop applications

Challenge

The internationalization problem is multiplied
due to use of different technologies in Web
and rich internet applications as well as
desktop applications

Solution

Consolidation of internationalization technology: Each
technology has its own internationalization framework:
We need a common framework for all of them

What to do
• Keep all internationalization data in one
place
• Extract internationalization strings from
application parts
• repeatedly
• automatically
• Let the applications pull the i18n strings

What do do
Web
Web
application
application
source code
Translator

RIA source String Localization
RIA
code Extractor Database
Intermediate
Converter

desktop
Intermediate desktop
application
Format application
source code
Translator

Example
How we did it in Mindquarry

Our technology
Our problem
• Web application framework: Apache
Cocoon, with Cocoon i18n Transformer
• Rich internet application framework: Dojo
Toolkit, with dojo.i18n.*
• Desktop client: Java and SWT, with Java
Message Bundles

Steps to consolidated
i18n
1. Find a common i18n database
format
2. Extract internationalizable content
automatically
3. Attach applications to i18n
database

1. i18n database
format
• QT Linguist .ts ﬁles
• XML ﬁles, easy to process
• QT Linguist is a good, easy-to-
use and free translation editor
• Can be used by non-
programmers

2. Automatic string
extraction
• We have three types of source code: XML,
Java and Javascript
• XML
• Ruby script parses all XML source code,
ﬁnds internationalizable strings not yet in
database and adds them
• Java and Javascript, similar with a more
complex parser

3.1. Attach Cocoon
messages.ts
(QT Linguist)

• Apache Cocoon‘s
databases are XML ﬁles XSLT

• Transformation via XSLT
messages_de.xml
messages_de.xml
(Cocoon i18n)

•
(Cocoon i18n)
Multiple output ﬁles, one
for each language
Apache Cocoon

3.2. Attach Dojo
messages.ts
(QT Linguist)

• Dojo uses JSON as XSLT

format messages_de.xml
messages_de.xml
(Cocoon i18n)
(Cocoon i18n)

• Transformation via XSLT
Apache Cocoon

• Handled dynamically via
Cocoon messages_de.js
messages_de.js
(Dojo i18n)
(Dojo i18n)

Dojo Widget

3.3. Attach Java
• Message Bundle Reader messages.ts
is overwritten (QT Linguist)

• Uses internationalization
database directory

• Internationalization i18n Adapter
database is being
distributed with desktop Desktop Client
client

How to get translations

do it yourself


¥ $
€

do it yourself pay someone


¥ $
€

do it yourself pay someone ask your users

User-contributed
• The holy grail

• Build a community and
website at the same time

• But hard to achieve

• Wikipedia

• Open Source projects

Build your own
translation
website
Allows users to sign-up,
contribute localization strings,
costly, but allows for automatic
post-processing, validation and
quality-control.

Ad-hoc-
translations: use
a wiki
Allows users to contribute
localization strings without sign-
up, easy to deploy, but requires
manual post-processing,
validation and quality-control.

Pootle: OSS for
web-based
translations
GPL-software, based on Python,
works with .po or XLIFF,
integration with version control,
basic project management, used
by 20+ open source projects

http://pootle.wordforge.org

More challenges in Web
2.0 internationalization

• User-generated content
• Rich Web design
• User-contributed translations

User-generated content
• User-generated content is great
• But hard to translate
• But translating it increases network effects
• English speaking users beneﬁt from
content generated by German speaking
users
• Is there a (partial) solution?

Solution
• Structured Content

• Sometimes easier to
translate

• ratings

• locations

• time & date

• Sometimes it is still hard

• tags

Graphical text
• Looks great
• But hard to internationalize
• can break calculated box sizes,
• re-creation necessary
• Do not do it
• unless you can do it right
• create dynamically on server

Thank you very much
lars@trieloff.net

For more information, see my weblog at
http://weblogs.goshaky.com/weblog/lars

Living in a Multi-lingual World: Internationalization in Web and Desktop Applications

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