Akvo platform internationalisation

Overview of internationalisation

As can be seen on the Akvo platform overview page, the platform consist of a number of different components. This means that internationalisation is a somewhat complex issue. Which is going to have to be done in stages. This page tries to give an overview of what needs to be done and describe what we are currently doing with internationalisation.

The short version goes something like this:

• Akvo RSR will get a multi-lingual user interface. We haven't decide on the timing of project descriptions in more than one language, nor how to do it yet.
• For the Akvopedia we are interested in working with partners to help us get the content in multiple languages.
• Akvo web site content (not Akvo RSR or Akvopedia) will stay in English for the moment. If we get a major partner who wants to work with us and keep the site content in another language, then we are interested in discussing this.
• Akvo blog posts are currently not likely to be translated due to the volume of work that would involve.
• If we have a multi-lingual site in part of the system. How should we treat that? It can look very messy having multiple languages in the system at the same time. We are still thinking about this.

Click on the picture to see a bigger version

Akvo RSR

Lets start with Akvo RSR, as we are building RSR from scratch.

The Akvo RSR templates files have tags in them showing which strings of text needs to be translated. If a language file is supplied for another language, for example French, then the user interface (UI) components of Akvo RSR can be made available in French. This will be possible to control in two ways, through the preference settings in Akvo RSR for the registered user and through language preference settings in the users web browser.

The translations are managed on the Akvo Launchpad.net site which has a translations section. Here someone who wants to help with the translations of Akvo can download a translation template, translate it into the appropriate language and upload it again. After a quality control check, the new language will be included in future Akvo RSR releases.

Projects which are stored in Akvo will need a different approach. We will have to build mullti-language capable project interface, which is capable of storing and managing more than one version of a project description.

Akvo support, field or funding partners will have control over the translations of project pages. In the future it could be possible that Akvo volunteers are available to do translations and the person who is responsible for a project in Akvo can farm out the translation of the project to such a volunteer.

Akvo RSR updates are created by different partners, including being sent as SMS messages into the system. It is not clear that we should provide a multi-lingual interface for updates as it is doubtful if there would be enough capacity to translate them. There is the possibility of using automatic translation tools here to provide rough translations of updates.

Akvopedia

The Akvopedia is based on the Mediawiki engine, which is the same software that powers Wikipedia. MediaWiki does not do multiple languages in the same site, but has a hybrid solution called wiki-family. This allows for:

"virtual directories" to operate more than one wiki on a single server, using the same source code (i.e. single set of MediaWiki files), using the same database, on a Unix-based system on a shared host.

For the end user there is not such a big difference, but software engineering wise there is. The work of providing translations for the Mediawiki user interface is provided by the software developers that produce Mediawiki and can be installed by us for free. But there is some effort required to configure Mediawiki to run smoothly with multiple language versions.

Translations of the articles inside the Akvopedia is a bigger issue. Wikipedia has taken a very relaxed approach to translations of articles. This means that essentially not two articles about the same subject in different languages on the Wikipedia are the same. For the Akvopedia we think this would be a bad development and we are interested in ideally having a close match between Akvopedia articles in different languages. This would have to be done with the help of volunteer translators or some type of external funding for the translation effort.

However, as the translation will be ongoing and the growth of the job is directly related to the number of articles you have on the site and the number of languages we will decide to try to support it could become a big job. Possibly too big to manage. For now we are working on the Akvopedia in English, but are very interested in finding partner organisations who want to help us with other languages.

Akvo web site

To be continued.