Localization

This article is under construction. Use the information herein with caution until this message is removed.

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
• Jason Aubrey, U. of Missouri

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

• CPAN -- MakeText