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L10N and I18N Project

The major target of the L10N and I18N project is to provide tools and workflows for localization (l10n) and internationalization (i18n). Whereas the focus of the localization is more on translation and l10n testing, the focus of internationalization is on the functionality of the product that need to be internationalized.

News - Sun and OOo Community Localization 

-  QA Weekend in Essen, Germany: Ales Cernosek, Petr Dudacek, Berit Bonde and Sven Klawitter from Sun/Globalization attended the event on March 25-26. Read here more words on the QA & l10n weekend in Essen.

-  Jacqueline Rahemipour, DE OOo Community Lead, and Andre Schnabel, OOo QA Lead, at Sun in Hamburg. Friday, February 2nd was fully dedicated on localization topics. Here below the agenda:
  • Globalization - presentation - Rafaella Braconi: G11n_and_DE_OOo.odp
  • QA matrix - live demo - Monica Badia
  • Documentation - open discussion - Uwe Fischer
  • StarOffice localization process - release engineering - Joerg Jahnke, Ivo Hinkelmann: Translation_Process_technical_overview_v4-2.odp
  • Preview of the Open Translation Website - Brigitte Le Grand
  • German Help review project - Plus and Deltas - Next steps – Berit Bonde, Sven Klawitter
-  New Locale Data Audit, please participate!
  • A comparison table of OOo m151 and CLDR 1.3 locale data needs your attention. 320kB. For reference purposes, the archived previous comparison, 500kB.
-  Dutch localization project: a collboration on translation, testing and review between Sun/Globalization and the Dutch OOo Community. More at: -  Pilot project to set up a localization process that can be shared with all OOo Communities. More at:

Localization - l10n

Welcome to the Localization project! OpenOffice.org is localized in quite a number of languages. As an overview of the languages and the native language communities engaged in this project, have a look at: http://l10n.openoffice.org/languages.html.

In order to localize OpenOffice.org into your own language, the major steps to follow are:

For each of the above milestones there are tools and processes to help you getting the localized product you want. Here below you'll find useful links to tools and instructions on how to proceed depending on the localization areas you are interested in:

For further OOo l10n documentation please visit Category:Localisation in the wiki.

Internationalization – i18n

The i18n framework (mostly implemented in module i18npool) offers support for Western languages, Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) languages and for languages that need Complex Text Layout (CTL) like Arabic, Hebrew, Indic languages and others. Functionality that is needed to internationalize applications like an office suite includes:

  • Word, line and sentence break
  • Search and replace
  • Paragraph numbering
  • Transliteration
  • Character classification
  • Numberformats
  • Calendars
  • Collation
  • Locale data

To support a new locale often nothing more has to be added than an entry in the language listbox and a set of locale data to be able to select the locale as the default document language, apply its number formats, list index entries in their correct order and have the typical outline numbering available, just to name a few. The locale data file needs to be available during build time and is compiled into a library, but except an entry in a table responsible for loading the correct library and a makefile entry no code changes are necessary. Note that mere UI localization does not even need corresponding locale data being available.

Only in a few cases it is necessary to implement specialized breakiterators or collation, calendars, transliteration into different numeral systems, or other language specific algorithms. For such tasks there is an


Modules

Modules in L10N and I18N Project

Module

Function

transex3

Localization tools

i18npool

New i18n framework (Western, CJK and CTL languages)

i18n

Old i18n framework (only Western languages)

I18N: Some ideas where we think some help would be useful:

  • I18n framework: Thai support

  • I18n framework: Complex Text Layout (CTL) support for Arabic, Hebrew and other languages

  • Check and add locale data for all languages

IssueTracker queries of ToDo items: