SoylentNews

As the dev cycle for the first release of rehash winds down (one remaining bug before we're ready to deploy), I've turned my attention another large site-related project, specifically the possibility of internationalizing and localizing the site. Internationalizing a very large legacy codebase is a lot of work, and I want to gauge interest. For clarification, this work would translate the UI, and the site interface itself, and not the articles. Historically, I'm aware of two successful translation project, BarraPunto, and Slashdot.JP. However, both of those projects did so by simply rewriting the templates in their native language instead of using a more flexible system that would allow for dynamic processing.

After a few hours of cursing, I was successful in modifying rehash to use Locale::Maketext::Lexicon, and load translations dynamically from gettext when a template is loaded. The practical upshot is that if I continue with this effort, we will be able to import all the static strings in rehash, and translate them through any service that can handle standard gettext POT files (such as Launchpad Rosetta), then have rehash load the specific language on the fly depending on a user's settings, or their browsers preferences. This also has the benefit that translators would only require a minimal amount of HTML knowledge would be required to successfully translate rehash.

What I want to know is the following:

• Is there significant interest to prioritize this project?
• Are there enough people who are willing to engage in translating rehash to their native language?
• Assuming there is a successful translation committed and launched, would people be interested in running a version of SN in their own native language?

As long as the first two answers are yes, I'll push to get a localized codebase in place for the next rehash development cycle (likely landing in July or August). Please note there is a *lot* of strings to be translated, I'm expecting upwards of a couple thousand once I've finished scrubbing through all the templates and libraries. If you are interested in this, please note your native language below, and I'll get in contact with you once we're ready to start doing translation work.

Just to show that this is indeed possible, here's the output of the generate-pot-files script, with the few templates I've gone through:

slashlithium~/src/rehash-ncommander$ bin/generate-pot-files
 * themes/default/templates/about;about;default
   - Total strings extracted : 21
 * themes/default/templates/admin;menu;default
   - Total strings extracted : 7
 * themes/default/templates/articlemoved;misc;default
   - Total strings extracted : 3
 * themes/default/templates/bannedtext_ipid;misc;default
   - Total strings extracted : 2
 * themes/default/templates/bannedtext_palm;misc;default
   - Total strings extracted : 2
 * themes/default/templates/main;404;default
   - Total strings extracted : 11
READING PO FILE : i18n/rehash.pot
WRITING PO FILE : ./i18n/rehash.pot
DONE