Localization

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WeBWorK Localization project

Localizing WeBWorK means locating all of the literal strings (or phrases) which occur in the WeBWorK user interface and replacing them with pointers to a line in a separate message file. Instead of printing the string embedded in the WeBWorK code, the program will look up the appropriate line the message file and print that string. To translate WeBWorK to a new language we will only need to translate each message line in the message file -- this is much easier to do than searching all of the WeBWorK code for literal strings and then translating each one in place. The hard part is the initial step of replacing phrases by pointers.

Initially at least this project is only concerned with translating the user interface of WeBWorK, the buttons, the error messages, the graphics which contains text and so forth. The contents of the WeBWorK problems themselves will continue to be language specific and we will not try to create any mechanism for translating problems in one language into problems in a second language.

People who have at one time or another expressed interest however mild :-) , in the localization project

• Michael Gage, U. of Rochester, New York, USA
• Jason Aubrey, U. of Missouri, Missouri, USA
• David De la Rosa, Centro de Investigacion en Matematicas, Guanajuato, Gto, México
• Martin Tamm, University of Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden
• Marc Buffet, Mechanical Engineering, Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Lyon, France
• Zsuzsanna Gönye, University of West Hungary, Szombathely, Hungary
• Eva Racz, Dept. of Physics, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary
• Arie Poran, Ono Academi College, Israel
• Dr. Mika Seppala, University of Helsinki, Finland

Others:

Feel free to edit this page to add yourself to the list, or remove yourself, or to add contact information, or further information about your interest.

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Software which might be relevant to facilitating the localization of code written in perl

• Cautionary tale about localizing software:
• CPAN -- MakeText
• An example: Catalyst Advent Calendar
• Bugzilla is an example of a throughly localized perl web application
• A plan for localizing an application.

Please add information about these software packages or to add additional software packages which we have missed.

Multilingual WeBWorK questions

This section collects ideas for future projects:

We now have WeBWorK questions written in several languages. As we gather these questions together into "national libraries" (all contained in one "international library"? :-) ) we will point to where these libraries can be found on the web.

It's been pointed out that in addition to language differences there are cultural differences even in mathematical homework questions between different countries. It would be interesting to have a website where the similarities and differences of say Calculus questions asked of students in different countries could be examined. It's a wide open project if someone is interested.

Developers