Localisation Guide
The general aim of this document is not to replace other well written works but to draw them together. So for instance the section on projects contains information that should help you get started and point you to the documents that are often hard to find. The section of translation should provide a general enough overview of common mistakes and pitfalls. We have found the localisation community very fragmented and hope that through this document we can bring people together and unify information that is out there but in many many different places. The one section that we feel is unique is the guide to developers --- they make assumptions about localisation without fully understanding the implications, we complain but honestly there is not one place that can help give a developer and overview of what is needed from them, we hope that the developer section goes a long way to solving that issue.
If you would like to help expand this document then please take a quick look at our editing guidelines.
Reading List
Some useful reading for the soon to be and established localisers. Please add good useful articles to these lists.
- Case Studies - people who have run a localisation project
- Localisation Introduction - guides and intros to localisation
- Industry Articles - useful articles from the formal localisation industry
- General Articles - as yet unclassified but interesting
Managing a translation effort
- Running a translateathon
- Setting direction
- Philosophical
- Automated methods
- Practical
- Glossaries
- Translators
Project specific information
- Desktop Systems
- Major Applications
- Distributions
- Fedora/Red Hat
- The Translation Project (some parts need to move to other sections)
- Other
- ReactOS - Microsoft Windows clone
Translation
- Per language translation guidelines
- Online resource for word definitions
- When translating
Locales
- Creating locale files
- CLDR
Tools
Translation Tools
- Choosing a translation editor
Glossary Tools
- TranslateIt on OSX provides system-wide translation into single or multiple languages, as well as glossary creation
Source Control
- Using CVS
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- An SVN Summary for people switching from CVS
- svnX -- intuitive SVN front-end for Mac OSX
- PathFinder for OSX has an SVN pane, and a multi-tab terminal pane
- The BBEdit text editor for OSX integrates SVN
- Using Git
- A Git-SVN Crash Course for people switching from SVN
- How to use Git at Debian
- How to use Git at GNOME
- Using Bazaar
- The Bzr Wiki
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- SSHKeychain on OSX manages your SSH keys
- SSHAgent on OSX allows seamless SSH logins
- SSH Tunnel Manager on OSX manages your SSH tunnels (e.g. to OpenOffice.org)
Other tools
- Statistics generation
- Comparing Files -- how to find changes in translations (diffing)
CAT tools used by translators
Fonts, characters and rendering
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- Unicode Checker on OSX provides system-wide Unicode codepoint and conversion/normalization services
- Your Multilingual Mac is a comprehensive Unicode resource
- Fonts
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- How to edit X11 Keymaps or create your own
- Edit or create OSX keyboard layouts using Ukelele
- Rendering
Other localisation
- Language Tools
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- Evaluating spellcheckers -- how to evaluate the performance of spell checkers
- spell checker case studies -- Documenting a discussion on developing spellcheckers that meet the needs of different languages
- CocoAspell integrates the Aspell dictionaries into the OSX system-wide spellchecker
- Grammar checkers
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- Other
- A list of programs with application specific, non-translation, localisation requirements
Notes to programmers
- Other guides
- intltool - used by Gnome and others to localise .desktop, .xml, .glade and other file types.
- Unfuzzying typo/grammar fixes to original strings
- Monolingual formats create certain problems that needs attention to make them usable.
