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1: Internationalizing LAMS 1.1: LAMS goes multilingual!
03/20/06 11:41 PM
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Ciao Everyone,

We are now starting the LAMS 1.1 internationalization!

As you might have seen, now also the LAMS Community is happening in other languages and have LAMS as a system that can run in other languages is a real need.

A bit of background first, LAMS internationalization (i18n) follows the standard of many other web applications. In order to have a web application in many/other languages, each label (or phrase) on the screen has to be tagged with an id and the content of each label put into a language dictionary file. Each language has one dictionary file where the reference of each label is translated to that language.

So for instance in the login page, the "Welcome to LAMS" phrase will be referenced with a unique identifier label (say we called the label id "lams_login_welcome").

Now, each language will have a separate dictionary file where all the translated labels for that particular language will be stored. So for instance the Spanish dictionary (es_dictionary.xml file) will have a line that reads:

label_id = value
lams_login_welcome = Bienvenido a LAMS


the English dictionary file (en_dictionary.xml) will have then:

label_id = value
lams_login_welcome = Welcome to LAMS

and so on for each other language.


Now we have started with the translation of LAMS 1.1 Authoring. We have created a webpage on the Wiki that has all the information and tools you need to translate these labels into other languages. We also created an wink animation that shows how to use the translating tool to create other language dictionaries. The application is quite straight forward to use and there are only about 125+ messages to translate.

So far, we have translationed LAMS 1.1 Authoring to:

* Chinese
* Spanish
* Partially Maori (work in progress)


In the past few months, we've been getting emails from lots of volunteers to translate LAMS to other languages. However, I would like to use this thread for volunteers to raise their hands to work in the translation. This way, we can see if there are various people willing to work on translation and they can work together, agree on terminology, etc, etc. Having done a few internationalizations before, it works better when done in a team :-)

If you are planning just to run with the instructions and do the translation, please let us know as well. Once you have translated the files, send it to us so we can add it to the translation list and make it available to others.

Again, this is the translation for the Authoring environment. Shortly we'll be releasing other internationalization instructions for Activity tools, Monitor and Learner's interfaces.

Special thanks to the New Zealand Ministry of Education for funding the technical work needed to get the internationalizations happening. Their support has been critical to all this.

Questions, comments, suggestions are welcome... please post them in this thread.

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

2: LAMS parla Italiano!
In response to 1 03/22/06 10:25 PM
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Many thanks to Edoardo Montefusco for translating LAMS authoring to Italian

We have updated the Translation Wiki accordingly as well.

Grazie Edoardo!

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

3: Polish translation - LAMS po polsku :)
In response to 2 03/23/06 08:07 AM
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Hi everyone!
My name is Adam Stecyk and I work on polish translation of LAMS. If you have any suggestion let me know :)

Hej wszyscy fani systemu LAMS - jesli chcecie pomoc w polskiej wersji dajcie znac :)

cheers

Adam

Posted by Adam Stecyk

8: Re: Polish translation - LAMS po polsku :)
In response to 3 03/27/06 12:13 AM
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witaj, też chciałem to zrobić;)
http://www.lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/technicalcommunity/forums/message-view?message%5fid=142877
możemy razem zgrać siły pozdr.
sebastian

Posted by Sebastian Komorowski

10: Re: Polish translation - LAMS po polsku :)
In response to 8 03/27/06 03:07 AM
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Hi Sebastian, Adam,

Last week we realized that certain character sets were having problems with the translator tool we created (a Flash based desktop application). It seems that in some cases, certain characters are converted to "undefined" strings :-(

This seems to be a problem with one of the widgets we use in Flash.

In addition, our main Flash developer (Pradeep) just had a baby last week so he's at home taking care of him.

Therefore, we are working on a web application that will be integrated with the LAMS Community to make the translations easier and more managable. See my next posting.

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

4: Re: Internationalizing LAMS 1.1: LAMS goes multilingual!
In response to 1 03/26/06 09:15 AM
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Hi Ernie,

I sent you the german translation, but it seem that it is not complete with the 125 strings. I missed the strings for monitoring and the screens from activities.

Ralf

Posted by Ralf Hilgenstock

6: Re: Re: Internationalizing LAMS 1.1: LAMS goes multilingual!
In response to 4 03/26/06 01:55 PM
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Hi Ralf,

Yes, that's correct. The translation now is for the Authoring environment. Shortly, we'll continue translating some of the tool and the Monitor an dLearner interefaces.

I have received your file with the German translation and will be updating the translation wiki page shorlty.

Vielen Dank,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

5: Re: Internationalizing LAMS 1.1: LAMS goes multilingual!
In response to 1 03/26/06 10:37 AM
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Hi Ernie Ghiglione,

My name is Charles. I´m from Brazil.

As I had told before I´m quite interested in helping you with Portuguese - Brazil translation. I am ready to starting translation!

Best regards,

Charles Niza

Posted by Charles Niza

7: Re: Re: Internationalizing LAMS 1.1: LAMS goes multilingual!
In response to 5 03/26/06 02:05 PM
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Bom dia Charles,

Great to hear that you'll be working on the Portuguese Brazilian translation (Brasil es o mais grande paiso du mondo!)

You can download the translation package from the Translation wiki page. Once you have downloaded, have a look at the translation animation for guidance on how to use the translation tool.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask here.

Muito obrigado,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

9: Re: Internationalizing LAMS 1.1: LAMS goes multilingual!
In response to 1 03/27/06 02:01 AM
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Hi,

I'll translate it into French.
Best regards,

Nadia

Posted by Nadia Spang Bovey

11: Attention ALL Translators! (Please read!)
In response to 1 03/27/06 03:45 AM
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Hi Everyone,

First of all, thank you soo much for all the translations you've been sending. It has been great to see all these translations coming every day. It has been much faster than we expected and be a bit patient with us for a few days so we can add them to LAMS.

Just to recap, so far we have Authoring translations in the following languages:

* Chinese (Thanks to: Fei Yang and Dapeng Ni
* German (Ralf Hilgenstock)
* Norwegian (Anders Grov Nilsen)
* Portuguese-Brazilian (Charles Niza
* Spanish (myself -although I can't really trust my Spanish that much... any helpers welcome!)


Work in progress:

* French (Nadia Spang Bovey)
* Korean (Jong-Dae Park)
* Maori (New Zealand Ministry of Ed)
* Polish (Adam Stecyk and Sebastian Komorowski)

While we were working on the Chinese translation, we have realized that our translator tool is not working properly with some character sets. It seems that when the translator tool (a Flash-based desktop application) generates the XML dictionary file, some of the characters get converted to "undefined" string.

It seems this is do to some parsing of the character sets not been interpreted properly by Flash.

In addition, our main Flash developer just had a baby last Wednesday and he's out of reach getting only a few hours a sleep per day :-)

However, by Thursday morning (UK time) we should have a new web application that will help us translate LAMS 1.1 within the community. In this way, members of the LAMS Community can become translators of any language they can help with and work together with others to complete the dictionaries. This would be a centralized effort rather than our current approach that requires quite a bit of fiddling with XML, send files on email, etc, which can be error-prone.

For all of you who have translated the dictionaries already: no worries, your translation will be added as it was before and you'll become the administrator of that language for the LAMS Community. So nothing to worry about.

So if you are about to start a translation, I would encourage you to give me just a few days so I can finish coding this extension to the LAMS Community (it's looking good, I'm coding at full speed ;-).

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

12: Re: Attention ALL Translators! (Please read!)
In response to 11 03/27/06 03:48 AM
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Oops.. forgot to mention the quickest translation we have had so far: LAMS Authoring in Italian by Edoardo Montefusco

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

13: Re: Internationalizing LAMS 1.1: LAMS goes multilingual!
In response to 1 03/28/06 11:20 PM
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Hi Ernie,

I´m interested in helping you with Hungarian translation.
Please let me know what I need to do.

Best regards,
Tamas

Posted by Tamas Keresztes

14: Re: Re: Internationalizing LAMS 1.1: LAMS goes multilingual!
In response to 13 03/29/06 12:49 AM
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Tamas,

As you can see in this thread, I'm working to get a new extension to this website to do all LAMS translations.

I should have it up by Thursday morning (UK time).

Once it's up, you should be able to apply for a new or existing translation language and start right away.

Thank you,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

15: Re: Internationalizing LAMS 1.1: LAMS goes multilingual!
In response to 1 03/29/06 01:45 AM
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I can translate Lams in french or help Nadia to do this work

Posted by pascal gibon

16: Re: Internationalizing LAMS 1.1: LAMS goes multilingual!
In response to 1 03/29/06 07:40 AM
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Hej Ernie!
I (jag) will (ska) translate (översätta)
LAMS into (till) Swedish (svenska).
Vi hörs! (e-hear you around!)
Anders Berggren :-)

Posted by Anders Berggren

17: New interface for LAMS 1.1 Translations
In response to 1 03/30/06 12:58 AM
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Hi Everyone,

As I mentioned earlier this week, the Flash application we used before to do the translations is a bit more of a hassle than a help, so in the past few days, we just put together a new interface that is also part of the LAMS Community so we can have all members working together in the translations.

So here are the basics of the new interface:

There are LAMS modules to translate: that have all the labels of everything that gets displayed for that module.

And there are active languages/locales, which are basically the languages that people have volunteer to work on.

Now, any community member can request to become translators of one or more languages. These requests go to the Language Admin that essentialy accepts the requests to create a team of translators for his/her language. This team now can collaborative work on translations for *any* module on their given language and they can distribute the work in any way they please.


So following these basics, the new web interface works as follow:

When a member gets to the internationalization (i18n) page, he sees a list of LAMS modules that are available to translate. Each module displays the list of languages that is being translated to. Each of these languages shows the different levels of completition (in percentage and number of labels missing for completing the module).

Everyone can click on the language and see *all* the labels that have and haven't been translated (everyone can view). Now if you want to edit, add or change a label, and you aren't part of the team of translators for that language, then you can become a translator for that language by submitting a web form there (it goes to the language admin for approval).

Once it's approved, then you can translate, edit, add or modify as many labels in *any* LAMS module you like (always, of course, just for the language that you are part of).

Doing translations is quite straight forward. There are two ways, the bulk translation (do all the translations at one go) or you can modify/add labels as you like.

When translating words, the page displayes the English (Australian) word and a brief description (in English) so you can find the appropiate translation.

Once a module has been translated completely into a language, we can click on a button and produce the XML or Java properties file that then we'll bundle into LAMS 1.1.

And that's about it. I think the interface is pretty-self explanatory, otherwise let us know and we can put together an animation to go thru all the details.

So far there's only one LAMS module to translate: LAMS Authoring. For this module, this is the current translation status for all of the active languages:

Italian 100% Completed!
Chinese 100% Completed!
German 100% Completed!
Portuguese (Brazil) 100% Completed!
French 100% Completed!
English (Australia) 100% Completed!
Norwegian 98.23% (2 missing)
Spanish 75.22% (28 missing)
Maori New Zealand 75.22% (28 missing)
Swedish 0% Translate
Korean 0% Translate
Polish 0% Translate
Hungarian 0% Translate

You can see this here.

In terms of the languages and teams of translators, here they are:

Portuguese (Brazil)
- Charles Niza

German
- Ralf Hilgenstock

Chinese
- Fei Yang
- Dapeng Ni


French
- Nadia Spang Bovey
- Pascal Gibon


Italian
- Edoardo Montefusco


Norwegian
- Anders Grov Nilsen


Sweedish
- Anders Berggren


Korean
- Jong-Dae Park


Polish
- Adam Stecyk
- Sebastian Komorowski


Hungarian
- Tamas Keresztes


Spanish
- Ernie Ghiglione


English Australian
- Fiona Malikoff
- Ernie Ghiglione


If there are more people willing to help or add more active languages, please do so:

http://lamscommunity.org/i18n


Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

18: LAMS i18n: 5 new tools up and ready for translations
In response to 1 04/01/06 01:52 AM
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Hi Everyone,

Just a bit of an update for the translation, now we have LAMS Authoring completely translated to almost 10 languages and three more on the pipe. Thanks to all of you for the quick work on this.

Now we just added five new tools for translation to the LAMS i18n module. They are:

* Forum
* Multiple Choice Questions
* Q&A
* Noticeboard and
* Submit Files

We will add more in the incoming weeks.

Also, if there's any feature that you think is missing or you would like the interface of the LAMS i18n module to improve (in any way), please do let me know. Now we have a lot more labels and having a nice interface might make things easier for all of us... so please let me know.

Thank you,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

19: Re: Internationalizing LAMS 1.1: LAMS goes multilingual!
In response to 1 04/01/06 01:01 PM
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How can we in Bulgaria start a wiki to work on translation of LAMS 1.1 I am senior developer, translator and teach-lead of the Bulgarian team. I assure You If I know the current technologie (not with translation tool) I will be very quick with the translation :-) I love LAMS. It is the best platform.

Daniel Denev

Posted by Daniel Denev

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