Edmedia, June 23, 20041

My Webpage can Speak Many Languages

Tomasz Müldner*, Fei Wang and Darcy BenoitJodrey School of Computer Science, Acadia

University, Wolfville, NS, Canada

* presenting

Edmedia, June 23, 20042

Contents

• In the past, most software programs could only “speak one language”.

• But:

• there are many multi-language countries

• there is a growing globalization

• Internationalization of a product means that the product can be adapted to various languages

•Localization of the internationalized product refers to the adaptation of this product to a specific locale

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Examples

• HRE http://www.hrs.de/

• Google http://www.google.com

• Webmail http://www.webmail.co.za

• Opera

• Word

• …

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IFW

Internationalization

process applied to the

development of a

website:

Internationalized Faculty Website (IFW).

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Contents

• related work

• functionality and implementation of IFW

• conclusions

• future work.

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Translation Process

Microsoft Word translations

Manual or Automatic?

L'intérêt pour l'internationalisation se développe rapidementThe interest for internationalization develops quickly

Das Interesse für Internationalisierung wächst schnell.The interest in internationalization grows fast.

兴趣为国际化迅速显现出The interest rapidly appears for the internationalization

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XML and Internationalization

• support for Unicode

• Separation Of Concerns (SOC)

• ease of converting to various formats, including HTML, VoiceXML, etc.

• support for mixing several languages

• help to avoid repetitions

• support for specifying translatable text

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IFW

• A website that will initially be displayed in one language

• Has the option to be displayed:in a variety of languages with various selections of data; and selections of formats these data are to be

rendered in

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IFW Creation: Roles and SoC

creators

administrators

translators

verifiers

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• Requests an account• Uses the account to access the IFW server• Enters CV data, using the interface language• Selects a primary (default) language• Selects one or more languages in which this

website can be displayed• Selects data to be shown and formats for display.

Creator: Input data

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Creator: Receive Product

A website contains one default webpage (displayed using a primary language), which can be used to choose:

• a secondary language to display CV data

• which data will be displayed

• a format for display.

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Kinds of Final Products

The final product may appear in one of two available kinds:

• transient

• persistent

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Administrator: Translations

• Translations are performed by translators, who have profiles.

• Translations are verified

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Implementation: Tools

• Java

• XML

• XLIFF

• XSLT

• JAXB

• databases (either native XML or relational that support XML)

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XML

• Enters data using GUIs interacting with data objects implemented using JAXB

• Internally, data are stored in XML

• Specifically, in XLIFF

• We use XSLT to convert between XML and XLIFF (and for rendering formats)

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Management

• Translators can be assigned manually or automatically

• Available formats can be removed and added

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Databases

• All translations are permanently stored and can be reused in future translation and verification tasks

• For each “segment” (XML element), the database stores the status of its required translations

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Which Database

• IFW needs XML

• Pure XML database: Xindice

• DB2 with XML extender: CURRENT CHOICE

• Microsoft SQL server with a schema language XML Reduced (XDR)

• … or just about any relational DBMS with XML support

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Conclusions

• We have designed and implemented IFW

• My home page can now speak many languages

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Future Work

• Applications of automated translation

• Internationalizing the IFW system

• Multiple interface languages

• Testing various databases

• Extending IFW to all (some) XML schema

• Using versioning systems to compare new translations and accepted translations