[theforum] RFC: w.e.o and l.e.o Server Integration

Martin martin at easyweb.co.uk
Mon May 24 15:21:01 CDT 2004


On Tue, 25 May 2004, Madhu Menon wrote:

> At 22:09 24/05/2004, Martin Paul Burns wrote:
> >i18n=internationalisation
> >l10n=localisation
>
> Man, I'm not l33t to understand these. :)

10,000 foot view:
i18n means that the site isn't just in English any more: the interface
(ie all those labels like "Preferences") can appear in multiple languages
- all the languages we have translations of them for. Similarly, we can
publish articles in multiple languages - the default language is not
necessarily English, and we can support translations of a given article.

Oh, and in an ideal world, this would be full Unicode, not just western
european languages.

l10n means that which language you get as default can be automatically
worked out from your browser preferences.

At one point, I had a neat demo of this running (actually with a mockup of
the current evolt site), but without that running (and bringing it back
would be a *major* pain in the ass), try playing with your browser's lang
prefs and visiting http://plone.org . Go on - try it in Japanese.

Ooh, lookee here: a lot of the interface work has been done for us:
http://plone.org/development/teams/i18n/existing-translations

Presumably other OSS CMSs have something similar.


> I now type fast enough that whole words take about as much time as the
> shortened version.
>
> In Martin's defence, he *does* work for IBM now, so he needs to sprinkle a
> bit of jargon.  (j/k dude!)

*thhhbbb* never heard i18n used at work (although there was some talk
about one app I worked on being used in Poland)

Cheers
Martin


More information about the theforum mailing list