Hello,
Not sure exactly who to talk to, but felt this was a possible place to
suggest/ask.
During my recent research into providing multi-lingual capabilities to
a mobile openSUSE application, I determined what is likely current
"Best Practice" while also exploring pretty much most of the history
of what has been "Standard Operating Practice" leading up to now.
I determined that until a couple years ago, there were movements and
enormous efforts dedicated to creating custom solutions for each
application, although there were efforts to standardize rormats and
methods(eg i18n), there was still the problem building a library of
translations.
Then, enter the major Search Engines. Although some Search Engines
like Yahoo created tools like Babelfish more than a decade ago, only
recently the leading Search Engines(primarily Google, and recently
Microsoft) have recognized the treasure trove of multi-lingual data
they store and also recognized their own needs to serve a
multi-lingual world.
That led to exposing their data for 3rd party use through APIs and in
some cases even self-contained software components.
Of course, this should be of extreme interest to a collection of
Products and Services like SUSE and openSUSE... and also the way that
different people communciate within openSUSE on Mailing Lists, Wikis
and more... Everyone communicates using their own language but that
always excludes people using other languages. Our Forums are
segregated by language, the wisdom and knowledge in one forum isn't
available to any in another language. A supposed International mailing
list like openSUSE Marketing is only in English, and if someone
actually posts in another language it's unlikely most people on the
List would understand the post...
All those and much more should be addressable by a comprehensive
effort to integrate State of Art multi-lingual tools, fully integrated
into Products (like the openSUSE OS), Services (like the Open Build
Service), and communications (like Mail Lists and Help Forums).
To see only a simple example of what I'm describing, you can see the
demo I quickly whipped up at
http://putztzu.github.com/demos/opensuse-translate.html
For that demo, I used Google's translation service which supports over
60 languages. I can guarantee you I don't personally write or speak
nearly all of them but anything I write using that technology would be
instantly understood by practically the entire world's population. BTW
- This particular demo also supports dynamic (changing) data in any
variety of source language (the original text doesn't have to be just
one language or any specified language).
Based on the openSUSE mailing list archives, it also looks like the
openSUSE OS struggles to be available in only a half dozen
languages... Wouldn't it be cool to support practically any language
in the world instead?
If this is something openSUSE would like to explore and implement, I'm
willing to manage an effort to implement full worldwide globalization
in all openSUSE products and services... Of course something like this
would be very big -- Although it would require considerable effort and
collaboration, and of course touches just about everything about
openSUSE, I consider this very achievable.
Am open to building a roadmap, identifying necessary legals, people,
projects and people who would need to be brought into such an effort.
I feel I have a suitable background for managing this kind of
project, over 10 years Project Management, Network Architect and
Developer building cutting edge and bleeding edge software solutions,
typically including mobile devices and distributed solutions involving
data translations and Business Intelligence.
Tony
PS. Noting this List will be closed down in favor of using
"opensuse-project" -- Should I re-post on that List?
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