Open Translation Tools in Zagreb and CiviCRM localisation ideas brought from there

Last week, another one of excellent events organised by Aspiration happened in Zagreb. It was Open Translation Tools 2007 and it covered a variety of topics, starting from cultural aspects of both content and software localisation, through managing open communities, mapping translation and localisation tools and resources, also including machine translation mechanics. Detailed agenda and notes from sessions are available on the wiki - I strongly recommend at least quickly skimming through them - great source of knowledge! On the CiviCRM related front, I had a couple of really excellent conversations with both current and potential users of our software - hopefully those will effect in new deployments soon. We'll definitely keep you posted on this. :-) I gave a speedgeeking session on CiviCRM and it was really nice to see people's positive reactions. One conversation gives me special hopes for introducing some really exciting functionality into CiviCRM. I was lucky enough to hook up with Brian, the founder of the Worldwide Lexicon project. WWL is a collaborative translation system that enables people to view, create and edit web translations to any language. What's really interesting for us, they developed really neat piece of software that - after some work and customisation - might help us provide built-in, inline translation capabilities. I envision this functionality to work in the following way: you turn on the "translation mode" and all the strings that can be translated get highlighted. After you click on one of the highlighted strings, nice JavaScript editor shows up and allows you to submit its translated version. This has a couple of advantages over the classic PO file based translations workflow that we use right now. First of all, it allows you to see the context of strings that are translated, which sometimes makes it much easier to come up with the proper translation. Another advantage is that you can gradually go through those parts of the application which are most commonly exposed to end users, and translate them first. Actually, being pretty enthusiastic about this whole idea, I could go on about the advantages for a while, but I'll stop here, since whole project is still in a very initial stage. However, if you're interested in this idea and would like to help, please feel free to contact us through our forums and we'll continue the discussion there. :-)