Copenhagen, 6 June 2006

EC CHM Multilinguality

Anton Cupcea

Finsiel Romania

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Internationalization…

Internationalization (I18n): modification of an application so that it can handle multiple languages, countries, etc.:

Display content (web pages, files) in end user’s language

Display messages around the site in user’s language

(e.g. “Home”, “Search”, error messages)

Input characters in end user’s language

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…Internationalization

Print out the correct characters

Search information in certain language(s)

Allowing other web application, humans, search engines

to pick up information in a certain language

index pages by language, have multilingual channels,

URLs

Handling dates, numbers and sorting words using the

rules of that language (not done in CHM portals, EU

standardised)

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Unicode

All portal pages are encoded utf-8 (Unicode implementation) because Unicode:

Incorporating it into applications and websites offers significant cost

savings over the use of legacy character sets

Enables a single software product or a single website to be targeted

across multiple platforms, languages and countries without re-

engineering

Allows data to be transported through many different systems

without corruption

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utf-8 best practice

Naaya tools also work in Arabic on www.semide.org

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Localization

Localization (l10n) involves taking a product and making it linguistically and culturally appropriate to the target locale (country/region and language)

Means to change the language on a Web site: User selection

Detecting the browser settings

Automatically, based on the user’s profile

Translation issue: Identifying un-translated or old translations of terms and phrases

Different roles for translators and content managers

Offering an interface for the content translation

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Language negotiation

When information is not translated in the language selected by end users it is displayed:

In the local language of the browser, operating system if

translation available

In the default language of the portal if translation available

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EC CHM approach …

Default language – English

Define the list of languages you want to have for your website Let users choose the language

Offer friendly interface for translating messages and labels that appear across the portal

Offer friendly interfaces for translating items of content (e.g. news, stories, documents)

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… EC CHM approach

Collaborate: import/export the translation of labels and messages in one language in XML format for widely-used languages (e.g. French, Spanish) the

translation can be done once and used by many

Multilingual syndication RDF channels in different languages

Multilingual glossaries