[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Chinese Language Support

[Dan Scott]

2008/5/14 Rayson Ho <raysonlogin at gmail.com>:
> I recently read about the Evergreen ILS, and found that it is very
> interesting (esp. a few universities here in Ontario are using/going
> to use Evergreen in production systems). I then translated the
> Evergreen wikipedia article to Chinese, and downloaded and started
> reading the code...
>
> I don't work for a library, but I know a bit about library science
> (LC, DDC, OPAC, etc). I hope I can contribute by translating the
> Evergreen software to Chinese. I just finished reading the "Assessing
> Evergreen for a Bilingual Academic Library" document, and I would like
> to start with translating the OPAC web UI first.
>
> However, when I went to the source tree (it's a fresh SVN checkout),
> the Open-ILS/web/opac/locale/fr-CA/ directory is empty. I would like
> to know the status of the French language support... and also, what
> sort of infrastructure is missing to enable full multilingual
> support??
>
> Rayson
>

Hi Rayson!

First, I should point you at the Evergreen wiki page on adding Chinese
support:  http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=evergreen-admin:customizations:chinese
Grace Liu and Jason Zou have been leading this effort -- see the
previous message on this list
athttp://list.georgialibraries.org/pipermail/open-ils-general/2008-February/000530.html
. They also started a separate mailing list to discuss the Evergreen
localization for Chinese: http://groups.google.com/group/evergreencn
** and Jason created a Google Code project for Pinyin sorting:
http://code.google.com/p/pgpinyinsort/

As for the translation of the OPAC, the process has changed since I
wrote the "Assessing Evergreen for..." report last year. I have moved
the translation process over to use GNU gettext (PO/POT) files which
are familiar to most open source projects. The process is currently
very poorly documented at
http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=evergreen-admin:customizations:i18n
under the "Build environment" heading. To give a very quick
introduction, assuming you have installed translate-toolkit and the
polib Python package:

$ cd build/i18n
$ make newpot # This generates a new set of POT files in the po/en-US
directory based on the files currently in SVN
$ make LOCALE=zh-CN updatepo # This generates a new set of PO files in
the po/zh-CN directory that you can use to start translating, or
updates existing PO files with new strings / marks existing
translations as fuzzy if the string has changed

The files that you would want to translate for the OPAC include
opac.dtd.po (Jason and Grace have already translated some or all of a
version of this, I believe) and db.seed.po (for some of the database
strings that appear in the OPAC). You'll see, for example, that
po/fr-CA/opac.dtd.po contains French translations for most of the
strings in the OPAC - some have changed since last summer, and some
have been added since then, so we're going to need to update that
translation.

Once these files have been translated in build/i18n/po/zh-CN/, go back
to build/i18n and run:

$ make LOCALE=zh-CN newproject

This will generate translated files in the build/i18n/locale/zh-CN
directory, which we can then move into the right place in the tree.
(The "moving into place" has not yet been automated).

The goal is to keep the translations in PO files in the version
repository, and only build the project files at release time when we
create the tarballs. So most users won't have to do anything; they'll
install Evergreen and the languages will simply be available to them.
But developers and the release manager will have to follow these
steps.

** Note to self: add this mailing list to http://open-ils.org/listserv.php !

** Note to self: update wiki page with these more complete instructions!

-- 
Dan Scott
Laurentian University