Dear Colleagues,
We are very pleased to announce significant progress in creating an internationalized (localized) version of WeBWorK. This translates WeBWorK's user interface (but not the mathematics questions) so that the buttons, instructions and most links appear in the local language.
This feature is already available in version 2.5.0 of WeBWorK, with updates to the lexicons contained in the "trunk" or current stable version of WeBWorK.
There is still much work to be done but thanks to the efforts of Ben Walters at Middle Eastern Technical University, Northern Cyprus Campus and to Grant He, an undergraduate at the U. of Rochester, we have made a substantial start. We invite you and your colleagues to help contribute to the project.
The wiki page summarizing what we have accomplished is at: http://webwork.maa.org/wiki/Localization. Feel free to edit it or add to it about other WeBWorK internationalization activities that you might be engaged in. We are clearly not aware of all of the work being done in this direction and we can all benefit if we know each others' projects and can reduce duplication of effort.
We have lexicons for three languages: French, Turkish and Spanish which are partially developed and being distributed in the 2.5.0 and trunk (current_stable) versions of WeBWorK. The language can be selected by the instructor of the course from the choices on the Course Configuration page. (see wiki page for more information.)
As we said there is still much work to do. Not every phrase has been translated, there are a few instructor pages that are not yet "localized" (read the wiki for details) and I'm sure that there are improvements that can be made to the existing translations. We welcome your involvement in this project.
If you would like to contribute to the current lexicon in some language or begin a lexicon in a new language please contact Jason Aubrey ( aubreyja at missouri dot edu) . He can supply you with the needed files and let you know who else is working on the language. You can also view the current version of the files at http://webwork.maa.org/viewvc/system/trunk/webwork2/lib/WeBWorK/Localize/
We hope that you have had opportunities to use WeBWorK successfully and we will be delighted to hear reports from you of what you have done or what you are interested in doing.
Best regards,
Mike Gage
Jason Aubrey