Speaking in tongues

By: François

Because God got angry at some point in time, computer programmers are forced to deal with localisation and internationalisation. Fortunately we have the translation server.

A very helpful sign

According to the Bible, "That is why it was called Babel — because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth." (Genesis 11:9) Ever since (or a wee bit later because computers didn't quite exist at the time), the IT industry has had to deal with internationalisation and localisation.

By the way, do you know the difference between the two? Here is what the Wikipedia has to say about it:

• Internationalisation is the process of designing a software application so that it can be adapted to various languages and regions without engineering changes.
• Localisation is the process of adapting software for a specific region or language by adding locale-specific components and translating text.

So TYPO3 has internationalisation (also called i18n for short) mechanisms for both the front end and the back end, and teams of dedicated translators care for localisation (a.k.a l10n) in quite a few languages.

It's only recently that I started using the translation server. I had translated an extension and was told by the author not to send him the translation but to put it up on the translation server. I had heard about the thing, but I didn't know a whole lot about it. So I started by looking at the TYPO3 wiki. This got me in touch with translators via the general translation mailing list (there's a specific one for German). I ended up enrolling as a French-speaking translator and adding some of my extensions to the translation server.

I won't go into all the details here, but let me just state the using the translation server is pretty smooth experience (once you get started) and it is indeed a very convenient way of managing translations. There are not that many extensions handled there and I can only encourage extension developers to adhere to that process. Just send a mail to the general translation mailing list, requesting that your extension be added and you're on a roll.

So go forth and multiply the languages!