Internationalization SA project

Our Eiffel Tower of Babylon

1 Overview
- 1.1 What is internationalisation?
- 1.2 What should we achieve?
2 Milestones
3 Possible future developments
4 Documentation
5 l10n: completed and on the work
6 Relevant Links
- 6.1 What other people have done
7 Team

Overview

"Many [people] would simply love seeing their computer screen showing a lot less of English, and far more of their own language." -- gettext doc

Our aim is not only to provide a framework to ease the translation of Eiffel-written applications, allowing the user to chose his/her preferred language at runtime, but also to let the developer access information and formats based on users' locale.

What is internationalisation?

The first thing that comes to mind is translation. But internationalisation isn't restricted to enabling translation: it includes making it possible to localise notations (time, date, numbers), measures, paper size, and much more.

What should we achieve?

Applications should be able to load localized strings at runtime and be provided with localized format strings (e.g date format).
Developers can use tools that automagically extract strings from source code and can try to get them translated in a file to distribute along with the application.
Users will still be unhappy and get depressed but in their own language, which we can all agree is a significant step forward.

Milestones

M2: May 5

feasibility: look at string classes (unicode and not) and how strings are used in EiffelStudio (creation, composition) (Ivano, Carlo, Leo, Hong)
file format: compare existing file formats for dictionaries (Etienne, Andreas)
tool evaluation: list and compare existing translation tools (Christian, Martino)

M3: June 13

write an initial .po to start translating and have a .mo for testing (Leo, Carlo)
mo parser: extract translated strings from .mo files (Etienne, Martino)
translation function: map hard-coded strings to translated strings (Martino)
- find a solution with templates
- globality: how to implement, the object should be shared between all modules (see class structure)
- find out how to use plurals (see plural forms)
Test unicode support in Vision2. [See test application in the SVN repository]
compile a list of basic features to provide (e.g. date/time format, system locale) [deferred]

M4: June 28

internationalization of EiffelStudio: surround strings with our functions
translation of EiffelStudio in some languages, for demo purposes (Italian, German, Chinese, ...) (see pootle Note: this is dead now -Leo)
code parser: extract strings to be translated from source code and generate .pot file (Leo)
language selection: add an entry in the preferences system
create a function to detect current environment language and settings (aka locale)

M5: July ??

Refactoring of whole library
Use our library for EiffelStudio
Clean up Wiki and improve Developer manual
Add support for other aspects of localisation - dates, number format etc. (possibly we can defer this a bit)
- Compile a list of basic features to provide (e.g. date/time format, system locale) (deferred from M3)