Translation-Community Manager

The Translation Manager role is to co-ordinate the efforts of the Sugar community to enable users to experience Sugar in their own language.

Background

Translation often refers to the specific task of providing text in a target language from the text in the source language. For software, this task is conventionally divided into two steps:

• Internationalization (I10n)

Enable localization in the base software

• Localization (L10n)

Provide local language equivalents for text in the base software

The base software for Sugar consists of two major components:

• Sugar Desktop

The Sugar Desktop is part of a Fedora remix. It provides the basic means for user interaction with Sugar. It includes the Journal activity.

• Sugar Activities

Sugar provides a library of several hundred individual activities which a user can install and run.

Internationalization (I10n) prepares the Sugar Desktop and Sugar Activities for localization (L10n).

• I10n

Sugar and its activities are primarily written in Python. I10n is supported by giving developers a means to identify text that can be displayed to the user. Alternate text can be provided in other languages than the original and the user can select an alternate language for Sugar and the activities to use in displaying this text.

Selecting an alternate language for Sugar requires other technical steps. The language must be visible in Sugar (Language Control Panel). Selecting the language needs to change other aspects of Sugar (e.g display right-left, handle '.' or ',' for decimals and grouping multiples of 1000, display of dates, and so on).

• L10n

Sugarlabs provides a page: http://translate.sugarlabs.org which supports localization of Sugar. It is based on Pootle, a process and software to facilitate localization. In particular, it stores files with the original text for Sugar and its activities and files with the strings for local languages.

The overall process is fail-safe in the sense that if an alternate language is selected but there is no string available in that language, Sugar displays the original. The translate wiki page saves translated strings which are immediately available for use in subsequent releases - leaving localizers to provide strings for new text in the release. If that text is not provided, the original text is displayed.