I had the chance to present a paper at the Sahana 2009 Conference on March 24, 2009 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, that provides an introduction into the main issues of Sahana Internationalization:
Btw., from the conference (and a talk on IRC), I picked up the idea to have a transliteration engine built in to Sahana, that allows transliteration of data, especially names, from one language/script to another.
Three days after the stable release, I have now packaged an update of the language pack for Sahana-0.6.2.2, easily available as usual via:
Due to the changes between RC2 and the stable release, the translation templates have also changed. Hence, most (formerly complete or almost complete) translations have new small gaps that need to be closed.
The next language pack update is scheduled for April 11, 2009.
I have now packaged and released the first language pack for Sahana-0.6.2.2-RC2, download it easily from:
Thanks to all who have contributed to the translations, especially to Gilbert Raja for his special translation sprint in Tamil.
The next update of all language packs is planned for 7th of March, 2009.
web2py2po is now part of the Translate Toolkit, see http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/toolkit/py2web2po
Sahanapy is a new challenge for the Sahana L10N team:
The web2py framework provides an internal translation interface, which is very useful in rapid application development, but not for collaborative translation and workflow control. Furthermore, unlike in Sahana-PHP, web2py’s localization engine is not PO-based, so the translation dictionaries can’t be worked on in Pootle directly.
To solve this, I have created two small python scripts (web2py2po) that enable us to convert web2py’s internal translation dictionaries into PO files and vice versa. So we are now able to use both, web2py’s internal translation interface (in RAD mode) and Pootle (in the wider community) - and propagate translations from one to the other.
The scripts can be downloaded at http://pub.nursix.org/translate/web2py2po.tar.gz
Dependencies: web2py2po scripts use the Translation Toolkit (tested with version 1.1.1), License: GNU/GPL2+
Dominic is back online, taking over again.
Thanks to Steve for the maintenance of this server, I hope you’ll keep up your attention to the Sahana project.
What’s next?
Dominic will be away for the next 2 or 3 weeks.
In the meantime this service is maintained by Steven Crooks - in case you have any problems to access this site (e.g., the Pootle server) please drop a note to our bugtracker or to Sahana-Localization at GoogleGroups.
The language pack for the Sahana-0.6.2-stable release has been updated:
Main achievements:
Thanks also to all the other contributors for their efforts!
The next update of the Sahana-0.6.2-stable language pack will be scheduled in mid february 2009.
After a few months of successful operation, the time has come to give the EDRS server a meaningful name.
Following some common examples, I decided to rename edrs.nursix.org into backus.nursix.org - in honor of John Warner Backus (1924-2007), the inventor of the FORTRAN programming language, also known for the development of the Backus-Naur Form (BNF), which is an important groundwork for e.g., compiler development (Turing Award 1977).
On December 3rd, John Backus would have had his 84th birthday.
The EDRS internet site is dedicated to the Sahana disaster management system - a global, free and open source software project that develops solutions for data management, activity coordination and collaboration in humanitarian operations after disasters.
I hope, this site and the facilities it hosts will live up to such a big name.
The New Delhi translation sprint arranged by Ajay Kumar on 1st November shows its effect as we have now an almost complete Tamil translation of Sahana - a great contribution by Gilbert Raja! In the course of this work Gilbert also found a Firefox plugin to enter Tamil UTF-8 characters correctly into websites (e.g. the Pootle itself).
