Summary

What is internationalization, when should you add it to your program, and how do you get started? This week Dwayne Bailey and Ryan Northey tell us about their work with Translate House and the different projects that they have built to make translating your software easier.

Brief Introduction

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• Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Dwayne Bailey and Ryan Northey about Translate House and the process of internationalization and localization for software projects.

Interview with Dwayne Bailey and Ryan Northey

• Introductions
• How did you get introduced to Python?
• Why did you get involved in localisation, what got you started?
• How would you describe the difference between internationalization and localization? Are there cases where it makes sense to only do one of those things?
• Why should people localise software into other languages?
• Translate House is an organization focused on localizing and internationalizing software projects. To that end there are a collection of projects that you develop and maintain. Can you briefly introduce each of them and describe their purpose?
• What was the first project that was created in that list and how did it lead to the creation of the other tools?
• At what point did you decide that creating an organization to own and support the tools that you were building was the right choice to make?
• You run a distributed organisation, how do you manage that?
• I was recently speaking with Michal Čihař about the Weblate project and he mentioned that he uses the Translate Toolkit for handling the low level aspects of managing the translation files. What are some of the architectural and design challenges that arise from needing to support so many different systems for managing source text and translations?
• How do Pootle and Virtaal compare to other tools for web or desktop based translation? Are they primarily used for translating software or do they get used for other sources of text as well?
• Given that Virtaal is intended for use on desktop systems by people who aren’t necessarily technically adept how have you approached the packaging and deployment aspects of it? What are some of the challenges that you have had to overcome?
• Given the fact that multi-lingual translation requires interacting with a large quantity of text in numerous alphabets, what kind of impact has the unicode handling in Python 3 had on your projects?
• What do you have planned for the future of your projects?

Keep In Touch

• Github
• Gitter
• Ryan
  • Github

Picks

• Tobias
  • Google Chromecast
• Dwayne
  • Jitsi Meet
• Ryan
  • Gitter

Links

• XLIFF
• Gettext PO Format
• CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository)

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA