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Translations management

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Yannick Warnier edited this page Aug 17, 2018 · 5 revisions

History

First language files

Chamilo is a fork of Dokeos, which is a fork of Claroline. In Claroline, and then in Dokeos, the decision was taken to have translations managed through PHP-formatted files. Something like this:

<?php
$TheFirstLanguageVariable = "The first language variable";
$SomeOtherLanguageVariable = "Some other language variable";

Also, files would be split by feature-set: one file for forums (forum.inc.php), one file for documents (document.inc.php), one file for exercises (quiz.inc.php), etc. One single common file (trad4all.inc.php) was used for variables shared between several features (terms like "User", "Teacher", "Student", etc).

Initially, those were not issues because:

  • there were only a few languages
  • there were only a few variables
  • contributors were mostly in the same team

Translator tools

But as time went by and the projects grew more popular, the need appeared for more streamlined tools for non-technical translators to contribute. Claroline created thr phpLangEditor extension for Firefox, Dokeos created the Dokeos Language Translator Tool (website) and things got a bit better for translators.

Overlap

Then, as the projects progressed even more and a bit before the birth of Chamilo (2010), issues started to appear because:

  • many terms were used in several features but not globally (learning paths and documents shared a lot of common terms), creating unnecessary duplication
  • the large number of terms started to generate duplication
  • more mature language needs appeared (plural forms, gender-specific forms, etc)

Parallel evolution

With time, Claroline died and the phpLangEditor extension for Firefox disappeared. The DLTT tool for Dokeos translations was replaced with a very basic version of Chamilo LCMS with a plugin for that (at https://translate.chamilo.org), Chamilo LCMS died making it necessary to either re-develop a translation tool, maintain the current one on a old version of PHP somewhere (in an insecure vintage Docker PHP image) or to make a big bold move and change everything to Gettext or XLIFF

Also, translation tools for other projects got more streamlined and more efficient: using standard Gettext/XLIFF/other syntaxes, allowing to share translations suggestions between projects, etc

Decision for a new format

The decision to go with Gettext was made mainly from checking the market of other Open Source solutions and reading the following sources:

A tool was then scouted to deal with those translations. Although Pootle is Open Source and enables that, several tests of importing our strings failed, and we decided to go with CrowdIn. In the future, would CrowdIn fail to meet our expectations or charge for the service, we could be able to work a bit more and enable a self-hosted Pootle platform, but at the time of writing and after several dozen hours of work trying to make Pootle work for us, this all seems like time that could be better spent doing something more useful for Chamilo.

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