Better localization support for Squeak
Last updated at 8:00 am UTC on 21 March 2007
Mentor
Serge Stinckwich (Serge.Stinckwich AT gmail.com)
Project Outline
Since the 3.8 version, the Squeak UI has been translated in several languages: english, german, french, spanish, japanese, ... The current translation framework still suffer from several drawbacks that we like to solve in this project with a more modular approach.
(Difficulty = medium)
Technical details
Squeak is an open-source multi-media Smalltalk flavor available on several platforms. Since version 3.8, the user interface of Squeak is available in several languages : english, german, french, spanish, japanese, ... In order to that, a framework of application has been developed by Ohshima Yoshiki (View Point Research Institute) that allows to translate each english sentence of the interface, as well as UI tools to ease the translation task.
Nevertheless, the tools are not really modular (the translation is done inside the whole image and not for each package) and the translation model is still rather rudimentary. The translations available are dispersed among the various versions of Squeak: 3.9, SqueakLand, OLPC, Croquet, ... One idea maybe is to have a central repository for all the translations, something similar to Rosetta.
This project is about designing a proposal for a better support of translations for Squeak:
- The first part of work will consist of a study of the current Squeak translation system, then the next task is examine the multilingual support used in other versions of Smalltalk like VisualWorks, or in other programming languages like Java, Python and Ruby.
- In a second time, a proposal will be made with a first Squeak prototype. The student should adopt a test driven development approach for his work.
Work will be achieved in collaboration with the squeak-dev mailing list in order to define the needs and the solutions.
Work will have to be published on SqueakSource regularly and the student will have to submit reports on the mailing list.
Benefits to the student
The student will learn how ...
Benefits to the community
More information
My project proposal in french: http://doesnotunderstand.free.fr/?p=208
Others pages in this wiki about this topic
Some threads about this topic on the mailing-lists
- on squeak-dev :1,2,3,4,
- on squeak-fr :1,2,3
