CS298 Proposal

Enhancing open source localization

Farzana Forhad (farzanaforhad2003@yahoo.com)

Advisor: Dr. Chris Pollett

Committee Members: Dr. Frank Butt and Dr. Robert Chun

Abstract:

Usually people wants to browse the web in their mother tongue and the software which displays text in local language is called localization.gettext is the tool for localization and internationalization is the more general problem of making software easy to localize to any language.Enhancement to gettext will be to eliminate the need for any compilation in producing English version of web pages yet still supporting unique identifiers for page items so that they can be easily localized to other languages. On the other hand Pootle is a translation tool which is used for localization. Pootle does not have any easy step to quickly add any locale directory. Pootle also can not manage file systems other than it's default directory and also works only with the static po files. Our enhancement to Pootle would be to get rid of these problems and actually make it work dynamic locale data rather han static po files.

CS297 Results

Test out using localization with gettext.
Download the source code of gettext and do some minor modificaion.
Do some simple experiments that make use of dynamic localization based on database tables.

Proposed Schedule

Week 1: (25 Aug, 2009 - 31 Aug, 2009)	Prepare 298 proposal
Week 2 - Week 5: (1 Sep, 2009 - 30 Sep, 2009)	Create an import tool to quickly add an existing po locale directory to Pootle.
Week 6 - Week 9: (1 Oct, 2009 - 31 Oct, 2009)	Extend Pootle to allow it to manage file systems other than it's default directory.
Week 10 - Week 13: (1 Nov, 2009 - 30 Nov, 2009)	Add support to Pootle to work with dynamic locale data that comes from a database rather than static po files.
Week 11 -Week 13: (10 Nov, 2009 - 17 Nov, 2009)	Work on writing the report
Week 14 - Week 15: (1 Dec, 2009 - 11 Dec, 2009)	Submit CS298 report and defense.

Key Deliverables:

Software
- Deliverable_1: Create an import tool to quickly add an existing po locale directory to Pootle.
- Deliverable_2: Extend Pootle to allow it to manage file systems other than it's default directory.
- Deliverable_3: Add support to Pootle to work with dynamic locale data that comes from a database rather than static po files.
Report
- Final Report and Presentation.

Innovations and Challenges

Like other leading tool (Launchpad) Pootle supports "translation overview", "choosing file format", "point and click suggestions." Pootle as well as Launchpad works only with po files to manage localization. It can not localize strings inside a database. so I will make Pootle work with an underlying database layer to make it more dynamic.
There is one big bottleneck in Pootle is, for translation it has to import every files from outside and after translation the file needs to be exported. I will enhance POOtle in such a way so that the files could be directly manage inside Pootle server.So that it does not has to be exported to be used.

References:

[2000] Practical Guide to Localization (Language International World Directory). Bert Esselink. Iohn Benjamin's Publishing Co. 2000.

[2000] Localization A Global Manifesto. Hines, Colin. Stylus Pub Llc. March 2000.

[2004] Technical Reports & Notes."http://www.w3.org/International/publications"

[2007] Internationalization Activity. "http://www.w3.org/blog/International"