Globalization presentation at Evergreen International Conference 2009

I was fortunate to be invited to give a talk (OpenOffice.org Impress / PDF ) on Evergreen's progress on the

globalization front at the first ever Evergreen International Conference. My friend

Tigran Zargaryan from the Fundamental Science Library of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia gave a

talk at almost the same time about his library's progress in adopting

Evergreen. Tigran himself was responsible for the translation of the

Evergreen catalogue and staff client into Armenian, and he confided that he

also expected to make significant progress towards a Russian translation

during the lengthy layovers at airports that are part of his normal travel routine.

So, my goal was to provide an overview of the progress we have made in

taking Evergreen from its American English roots and enabling it to support

not just translated interfaces, but properly localized content display - and

to provide some pointers towards where we need to go next. We have been

making progress towards a more formalized translation process, so keep an

eye out for a call for translations in the next week or two when the Evergreen

1.6 release candidate is made available for testing. We currently sport

Armenian, Canadian English, Canadian French, and Czech translations, and

welcome both new translations and revisions to our current translations.

To make it easier for translators to collaborate, we need to take our

Pootle translation server from a

beta service running on my poor little VPS to a real server. We have some

technical challenges to overcome - providing translation support for the

Template::Toolkit framework, for example. And we have some basic grunt work

to do to replace the hard-coded display of numbers, currencies, dates, and times

with localized variations throughout our code.

I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people attending the session; I

hadn't expected such an interest in the topic, despite it nominally being an international

conference. My only regret was that I rushed off the stage without taking

questions in the mistaken belief that I had used up all of my time and was

eating into my successor's presentation timeslot; as it turned out, there

was a built-in 15 minute buffer that I had overlooked. Ah well. Thanks to

everyone who came out, and for everyone else who wasn't able to make it to

the session, I hope you'll find the slides a good introduction to the

state of globalization in Evergreen. And if you have the skills to contribute, please

consider pitching into the globalization enablement effort!