Community Server on my mind

Community Server is now fully translateable to other languages

Some of you that has been with Community Server for a while now, might remember that I previously coordinated the translations of CS. I think we at most were about 10 people with 10 different languages. You might also have seen that I've witting about translating CS earlier.

With the release of CS 2.1, I felt it was time to talk a bit about translations of CS again. Why? Well, one of the big things is that CS is now (with the release of 2.1), for the first time in history I believe, 99,99 % translateable. The figures are not a scientiic calculation , but I think you get what I mean. There have so far always been strings that were not lifted out to the .XML files of the language packs. Mostly it has been with in the admin area, but nevertheless.

One person that has been driving this task, to list strings that were still left in the code, put a bit of pressure on Telligent to lift them out , and have done a great work in all this is known as mannie at CS.org. Mannie has also just released a german language pack for CS. Thanks to Mannie for all that work, and to Telligent that made the effort to fix these remaining language issues!

So why is this so important? Doesn't everybody know english? A very large part of the worlds population do, but there are still some that don't. But that is just one reason for having a translated product. Another important reason IMO is to be able to get CS into the local markets. What I mean is mainly government agencies, and companies in the public sector, which would not accept a product (at least not in sweden) that is not in the native language. On top of the language, they require other regional settings as local date formats and currencies to also work in the product, which is mostly solved in ASP .NET by itself if the product is correctly developed.

A fully translated product also gives a higher impression of quality than a 80/20 or 90/10 translated product. That is, if the product is translated in a professional way. Translation IMO is a difficult task. It is almost never a matter of translating word for word. If you do that, it will not be any quality of the translation, and the user might not even understand how to use the product. This is an area that books could be written about, so I won't dig any deeper in that now.

My point in this post is, we now have a nearly 100% translatable product, which is great. Now let's get some new great language packs for CS!

Before I leave you alone, just a few words about the translation routines. There are currently no coordination from my side regarding the translations. There are also no bundled language packs with the CS releases (which I think is good). Today if you do a translation, upload it to the CS file gallery. What I can do, is to investigate if we can have an open forum for translators at CS.org, so people working on the same language can find each other and work together. I'll get back to you on that.

Oh, and there's a good translation tool available if you want to use it!