DSL Ideas and Suggestions :: what about internationalisation ?
I'd like to make my DSL work with russian (work with texts in koi8-r encoding and keyboard en/ru switch using alt-shift or right alt keys)
Is it possible to make special developers team for DSL i18n to different languages (special forum sections for non-en user groups) ?It's really a good suggestion. I Do wanna use DSL as my desktop computer OS. But I feel very regrettably when Firefox can't display chinese. Taiwan linuxers have redistributed a Traditional chinese version of DSL.But the input method is not for Simplified Chinese users.Maybe it can be adjusted,at least I cann't or troublesome. As you know,most of linuxers in chinese is newbie.So chinese font's display and input is the most difficute and important part to us. Maybe the size of language package is too big. A extend dsl package which is option will be acceptable.In the spanish forum there are several requests and even interest for a translation package as well.
The codepage problem is tiny with spanish and the Wiki could be translated also very easily.
Quote (ponyatov @ July 20 2006,13:55)
Is it possible to make special developers team for DSL i18n to different languages (special forum sections for non-en user groups) ?
This is an excellent idea, there will be three problems:
1. Covering the 9 languages that make up over 50% of speakers: Chinese, English, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, Bengali and Hindi. By my count, the distro that first offers easy to use internationalization in these languages will have a potential user base of over 2 billion people;
2. Internationalizing older applications that use 8 bit fonts; and
3. Converting to Unicode.
Internationalizing older applications will be easiest:
a. Create three or four new fonts by replacing the obsolete "graphic" characters from the IBM ASCII character set. By my count, there's room for 54 new characters. In one font, add macron, acute, hacek, circumflex, grave, umlaut and tilde diacritics on all upper and lower case vowels that don't already have them. This will cover Bejinghua, Guangdonghua and the vowels of most European languages. Russian will require a second font. Bengali and Hindi will require at least one more font.
pfaedit - Outline font editor http://pfaedit.sourceforge.net/
c. The hardest part will be lobbying the application developers to adopt the fonts and internationalize their programs, including the operating systems. Internationalization involves placing every different text string in a separate DLL or ELF file and linking to it. Changing to a different language would require swapping out DLL or ELF files. String comparison operators would have to be more complex, so programs would have to be rewritten.
Converting older applications to Unicode probably won't happen. New programs should be written with Unicode and internationalization in mind. (That is, multi-byte fonts and text in separate language files.)
original here.