how to make your project's website and wiki internationalized

How to make your project’s website and wiki i18n’d

How to make your project’s website and wikiinternationalized

Ming-Ting “Yao” Wei

LXDE.org Core Team Member

GNOME.Asia Summit 2009

Who am I?

Ming-Ting “Yao” Wei (Medical-Wei)TaiwaneseA Naı̈ve sophomoreLXDE.org Core Team Member and Site AdminMember of Ubuntu Taiwan LoCo Team

Who am I?

Ming-Ting “Yao” Wei (Medical-Wei)TaiwaneseA Naı̈ve sophomoreLXDE.org Core Team Member and Site AdminMember of Ubuntu Taiwan LoCo Team

Outline

1 The importance of internationalization

2 The importance of website internationalization

3 Our experience on LXDE.org website internationalizationThe beginningThe Drupal partThe MediaWiki partThe phpBB part

Outline

The importance of i18n

Why internationalization is important?

Make more people use your softwareAccording to Wolfram|Alpha Result, the top 3 usedlanguages are:

Chinese (13.69%)Spanish (5.05%)English (4.84%)

And there remains more than three-quarter speakers ofother languages.

Make those people familiar with your projectThough there are a lot of people who learns to use English,it is more impressive if we have a native translation for them.

However...

That’s what most developers know. Most software projects nowalready has its internationalization structure of its software.

The importance of website i18n

But most of them forget...

The website internationalization is also important......especially for those who are not speaking English!

But most of them forget...

The website internationalization is also important......especially for those who are not speaking English!

Why website internationalization is also important?

The project website is one of the faces to users.There are many people aware of English; They don’t knowhow to get software downloaded if they can’t read thewebsite.

Users want to find documentations in their language.Such as Wikipedia, a good multilingual encyclopedia.

They can also give us feedback with their mother tongue.Only if they know there is the forum available with theirlanguages.

Our experience on LXDE.org website i18n

Outline

The beginning

In August 2008, Taiwan, LXDE team are talking about itswebsite rebuild, and I joined them.

We rebuilt the site with CMS (content managementsystem), Blog, Wiki and Forum program rather than simpleHTML.

We chose Drupal as our CMS because of its flexibility andsimpleness.

WordPress, MediaWiki and phpBB are also chosenbecause it is common thus easier to get supported.

The beginning

The Drupal part

Outline

The Drupal part

Introduction

LXDE is a new project aimed to provide a new desktop environment which is lightweight and fast. It's

not designed to be powerful and bloated, but to be usable and slim enough, and keep the resource

usage low. Different from other desktop environments, we don't tightly integrate every component.

Instead, we tried to make all components independent, and each of them can be used

independently with few dependencies.

Features

Lightweight, runs with reasonable memory usage

Fast, rund well even on older machines produced in 1999

Good-looking, gtk+ 2 internationalized user interface

Easy-to-use, the user interface is simple, but usable enough

Figure: The LXDE website before September, 2008. It is still in LXDESVN repository, but is out of images.

The Drupal part

English Português Español 正體中文

The "Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment" is an extremely fast-performing and energy-saving

desktop environment. Maintained by an international community of developers, it comes with a

beautiful interface, multi-language support, standard keyboard short cuts and additional features like

tabbed file browsing. LXDE uses less CPU and less RAM than other environments. It is especially

designed for cloud computers with low hardware specifications, such as, netbooks, mobile devices (e.g.

MIDs) or older computers. LXDE can be installed with distributions like Ubuntu or Debian. It provides a

fast desktop experience; connecting easily with applications in the cloud. LXDE supports a wealth of

programs that can be installed locally with Linux systems. The source code of LXDE is licensed partly

under the terms of the the General Public License and partly under the LGPL.

Read more Português Español 正體中文

Download

Debian Live CD Image (451M)

AMD64 version (449M)

Debian Live USB Image (462M)

AMD64 version (474M)

LXDELXDE Foundation

About Download Screenshots Blog Wiki Planet Forum IRC Join us

Figure: The LXDE website now. It is using the default theme whichDrupal CMS provides.

The Drupal part

English Português Español 正體中文

About Download

Figure: The language selection menu on the top of the LXDE website.

The Drupal part

Setting up those website applications are easy.If you haven’t set up your website yet, you can follow thedocumentation in those packages.

We installed i18n (internationalization) module, as well asgallery and others.

Construct the website contents in English.

Translate those contents from English to other languages.

The Drupal part

LXDE is a GPL licensed open source desktop environment for Unix

LXDE stands for "Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment".

LXDE is an energy saving and extremely fast and performing desk

performance spectrum such as new generation netbooks and othe

LXDE View Edit Track Translate

Figure: The “Translate” button to translate articles into a newlanguage.

The Drupal part

What we did at then...

Initially, we have set up English and Traditional Chinesewebsite contents.

We encourage people interest in translating the LXDEwebsite start from the wiki.

Months after, Henrique P Machado (who also helped us alot in LXDE project) translated the whole website intoPortuguese and gave me packages with HTMLs, and I putthe whole translation into the website.

Then, Lino Sotomayor gave me a translated Spanish pageand asked me to put into the website, and now it is partlydone.

The Drupal part

pañol 正體中文

About Download Screenshots Blog Wiki

pañol 正體中文

關於下載畫面展示網誌 Wiki 文件

pañol 正體中文

Sobre Download Screenshots Blog Wiki

Figure: Multilingual menus

A modification is done on the code of the theme to let menuwork in multilingual environment.http://drupal.org/node/213257

The Drupal part

What will we do next?

Adding more and more languages into our site.

Redesign the look of the website.

Keep it updated.

The Drupal part

Keep it updated.

The Drupal part

Keep it updated.

The MediaWiki part

Outline

The MediaWiki part

navigation

Main Page

Recent changes

Random page

community portal

LXDE.org

download

Screenshots

Planet

discussion view source history

Log in / create account

Welcome to the LXDE WikiLXDE is a faster and less resource hungry

free and open source desktop environment.

The wiki has 90 articles so far.

Components

Distributions

Roadmap

Benchmarks

System

Requirements

Projects

Events

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) · Support · Installation categories · articles

LXDE , Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment, is a desktop

environment which is lightweight and fast. It is designed to be user

friendly and slim, and keep the resource usage low. LXDE uses less

RAM and less CPU while being a feature rich operating system.

Because of the low usage of resources it also saves energy. We don't

tightly integrate every component of LXDE. Instead, we try to make all

components independent, so each of them can be used independently

with few dependencies. This makes porting LXDE to different

distributions and Unix systems easier. A good starting point is the

General Information page, where you find information on system

Figure: The main page of LXDE wiki

The MediaWiki part

support,

LXLaunc

LXPanel,

applicati

from GU

files. The

LXSessio

automat

desktop

rememb

restart t

LXSessio

in other languages

العربية

Deutsch

Español

فارسی

Français

Arpetan

עברית

Magyar

Bahasa Indonesia

Italiano

日本語

한국어

Figure: Language selection with 24 languages available.

The MediaWiki part

Setting up those website applications are easy. (again...)

The module we installed (what I only remember) isreCAPTCHA. It is a CAPTCHA service which also helpdigitalizing documents.

For MediaWiki, roughly there are 2 ways to do withinternationalization.

The MediaWiki part

2 ways to internationalization

The simpler way is construct only one wiki and rename itstranslated articles with postfixes.

Easier for a already-built wikis and simpler for managing.Such as:http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki/zh-tw

Or, you can set up multiple wikis, and construct interwikilinks via manipulating database tables.

Much difficult to set up and maintain, but it gives users thesame feeling of Wikipedia.Guide to set up this kind of site:http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Wiki_family

The MediaWiki part

How do we internationalize our wiki?

We set up multiple wikis, one language per a wiki, butshare the same program by switching LocalSettings.php.

Of course, creating a new wiki for a new language needs ainstallation.

We use the same database, but differ wikis with differentschemes.

The image information is shared, not to waste the storagingspace.

The MediaWiki part

Applying a bot which automatically coping with interwikilinks in different wikis.

The phpBB part

Outline

The phpBB part

ForumHome Download Screenshots Blog Wiki Planet Forum Join

Board index

FAQ Register Login

View unanswered posts • View active topics

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Read this first if you want to report a bug or send a patch!by PCMan on Thu Jul 30, 2009 6:24 am

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Thu Jul 30, 2009 6:24 am

Next generation PCManFM is now under development!by PCMan on Sun Jun 07, 2009 4:33 pm

8 2308 by phillipe

Tue Sep 22, 2009 7:14 am

Please join xdg mailing list if you can.by PCMan on Fri Jun 05, 2009 3:31 pm

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If your problem is solved, pls do a little help for others.0 1566 by Medical-Wei

Figure: The main page of LXDE forums

The phpBB part

LOGIN • �GI��

Username: Password: | Log me on automatically each visit Login

please.

L%&� ��(#�� Net)o$*

Links and infos how to connect to the LXDE community on social networks

like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Xing, Orkut and others.

7 14 by +��,

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GLOBAL - ILLAGE TOPICS POSTS LAST POST

C.i/e�e L%&E 0orum / LXDE 中文討論區This is the LXDE forum for Chinese users. Feel free to ask here in Chinese.

這是 LXDE 的中文討論區，歡迎在本討論區使用中文表達。

Moderator: Medical-Wei

35 116 by jackpapa

Tue Nov 17, 2009 3:34 am

German language LXDE Forum / Deutschsprachiges LXDE ForumThe German language LXDE Forum. Das deutschsprachige LXDE-Forum.

Moderator: maces

14 40 by chaot1983

Fri Sep 18, 2009 9:31 pm

Portuguese LXDE Forum / Fórum do LXDE em português

Moderator: ZehRique

1 1 by giorgio

Tue Jun 16, 2009 12:19 am

French LXDE Forum / Forum français LXDE

Moderator: Mario Behling

4 9 by aramis_qc

Sat Oct 24, 2009 8:45 pm

Figure: The group for other languages than English

The phpBB part

Setting up those website applications are easy. (again andagain...)

Installed all the language packages, and some mods(modifications) for the convenience of users.

When users register their account, they can choose whatinterface language do they want.However, you may also need the translations of mods. Inthis case, please do not hesitate to ask for help from peoplein the forums.

Make a group called “Global village” which people can postin their languages.

The phpBB part

Ending - i18n vs l10n vs m17n

Internationalization vs Localization vsMultilingualization

Localization is, you tell people your things are ready forbeing translated, and volunteers translate it for you.

Then, multilingualization thus can be done.

To do, or not to do; that is a question.- adapted from Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Questions & Answers

Special Thanks

Dr. Nguyễn Thái Sơn - for writing Vietnamese in LATEX.

LXDE Project - who helped me a lot in free softwarecommunity.

Cấm Nhật, and Ngọc Trân - Sisters who helped me do oraltranslations.

how to make your project's website and wiki internationalized

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