From: Alexey C. <al...@ch...> - 2006-09-25 10:48:58
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Hi folks, I've thought about Mantis i18n, and this is what I got. The following is a kind of roadmap I propose to discuss and apply. As there is no wiki page for i18n at the moment, I'll post it here first. This message is rather long, and you can just read Summary, if you wish. Summary ======= The following tasks need to be accomplished for Mantis i18n. I've tried to list them by priority (higher first), and to categorize them. Community --------- * Forums. Set up the utf-8 internationalized forums (phpBB or punBB) * Announce. Reflect i18n activities and invite to participate on Mantis website * Maintainers. Renew active maintainers list, and make them moderators of international forums. List unmaintained languages to invite new maintainers. * Status. Website should have a really good translation status section. * Howto. A translator's manual should have been written. Mantis Internationalization --------------------------- * Core bugs. Some of Mantis code handles national characters incorrectly. These issues should be corrected first of all to spread Mantis really wide. * Actual language files. Our translations should be usable. * Unified encoding. Database format. Frontend. E-mail. Utf-8? * International website. Internationalize and restructure all the website (e.g. wiki) * Documentation. Make Mantis documentation translatable. * Timezones. Normalize timezones in database and internationalize timzeones in UI * Install/Admin. Allow for Mantis admin interface translation. Tools ----- * Automate translation routine. Migrate to Gettext/PO? Or XLIFF? * Isolate language specifics. Internationalization API? Details follow. Community first =============== First of all, we should make our users know that Mantis is available in different languages, and that we are trying to make it truly multilingual. Internationalize forums ----------------------- Mantis forums have no offer for international users to communicate with each other and with language maintainers. Thus, any language maintainer feels alone and lacks a feedback from his/her language users. To have both active English and international feedback, we should upgrade both engine (to become utf-8 and Multilanguage a.s.a.p): * phpBB 2.0.21+ (used by gentoo.org, there are several utf-8 issues to solve, more or less documented on phpBB.org) * or punBB (used by mozilla.org, I am personally not familiar with that one) * or something else with utf8 and structure: Help and Assistance * News and Announcements * FAQ * Installing Mantis * Using Mantis * Customizing Mantis Development * Mantis Development and Documentation Mantis International * Bulgarian * Catalan * Chinese * ... * Turkish * Ukranian International forums should be moderated by appropriate language maintainers (if none available, any active forum user could become one). Announce on website ------------------- With current website, it's difficult both to find international Mantis support and find out how to participate in Mantis internationalization. As an absolute minimum, we should make these updates: * General/Download page should have language files listed (or explicitly say something like 'All language files are included in Mantis release file. You are encouraged to update them to the latest version from CVS') * There should be the link to Mantis international forums and the 'translate!' link to the development section, too. Show maintainers and status --------------------------- There is no easy way to try any language except installing Mantis. As many languages are outdated, there is also no easy way to evaluate the language activity to decide if it's worth using. And finally, the Mantis website doesn't encourage anyone to become Mantis language maintainers. Ont possible solution is: * Mention current language maintainers on Mantis website so users could report their feedback * List all translator credits as they need some recognition * Display translation status like http://tortoisesvn.net/translation_status (needs migration to gettext/.po) Good overall example of how to maintain translations is http://tortoisesvn.net/translation. Except of using .po for documentation--I think wiki is better suited for this task. Translator's howto ------------------ Some (consice yet understandable) manual for translators is a must ;-) Mantis International ==================== Mantis is currently a kind of 'localized' (or 'translated') application, but not an 'internationalized' one. This means, you can use it with almost any language+English, but you generally can't use it with several languages at once. Core bugs --------- Mantis has several problems in these areas, that need to be handled: * Strange behaviour with multibyte character sets (CJK) * 8859-2 errors * wrong filenames on download * unset html page charset * broken CJK emails These problems should be fixed first, before any talk of utf8-ing Mantis. Actual language files --------------------- Only about 50% of our langfiles is up to date. Mantis couldn't be international at all without proper international language files. So we should just rely on active language maintainers with this effort, and give them the appropriate infrastructure. Unified encoding ---------------- Saying 'internationalization', first of all I mean 'allowing for multilingual work with Mantis'. The known tasks are: * Locale-independent database format * Locale-independent frontend and e-mail messages So, it's all about Unicode (possibly utf-8). International website (wiki?) ----------------------------- This time, any international user getting to Mantis website sees it English. Many Mantis users get to the website just by curiosity, clicking 'Mantis' or 'User documentation' links in their Mantis installation. By the moment, they read Mantis UI in their native language, and expect to see an internationalized content. The (unexpected) English site obviously repels them, as the localized Mantis site could make them Mantis enthusiasts. To make Mantis truly international, we should have international website, too. Consider migrating website to Wiki-like technology to internationalize it easily. Maybe we'll need two sections-one for 'official' stuff, and another for 'community stuff'. Maybe not, and forums will do for the latter. Also, it's about time to think about restructuring the Mantis site--it's structure looks too complicated for first-time visitor. Mantis Documentation ------------- Mantis user documentation is not translatable at the moment. Something like Multilanguage 'Subversion book' (in wiki form?) will be useful. Timezones --------- Mantis stores time in database with local offset. This leads to some difficulties within multi-timezone environment. Install/admin ------------- Install and admin interface of Mantis is unlocalizeable. Not really a problem because almost every admin knows English, but worth attention, too. Tools ===== Automate Translation Routine ---------------------------- There are many routine tasks such as updating the translation, fetching its status etc. Migration to .po (and/or export/import to xliff) could help a lot, though it's not a priority issue due to rather manageable amount of text messages in Mantis. Isolate from Language Specifics -------------------------- CJK and Slavic locales (as, I think, some others) have specific issues connected to non-standard mail headers, encoding etc. Maybe isolating all this stuff into Internationalization API could help. AFAIK, there are not many of them, and this is low priority task. With kindest regards, Alexey Chumakov |