Localize

FLOSS Manuals has a simple mechanism for translating the interface of the site. This enables the creation of different language versions of FLOSS Manuals. Localize is the name of a group of tools we developed for this purpose.

 

The above is the 'front page' of our localize tools. These tools help you translate the interface of FLOSS Manuals into other languages. Please note, this is not the same as translating the manuals themselves, we have other tools for this purpose.

You may only be given access to the localize interface for the purposes of translation. So if you never need to translate the FLOSS Manuals interface you will probably never see these tools.

Portable Object Files 

If you wish to choose a language to work on you simply click on the short name of the language on the left. These abbreviations all have the suffix '.po' that is because the interface of FLOSS Manuals is rendered by substituting the source language of the site (in this case English) with the appropriate Portable Object file (.po).  Portable Object files are used increasingly in free software projects for managing interface languages. Essentially it works like this:

1. Each English phrase ('source phrase') in the interface is represented in each '.po' file
   
2. The entire source phrase is used as a unique variable name
   
3. For each source phrase there is a corresponding translation in the relevant .po file
4. This translation is essentially the 'value' of the unique variable mentioned above
   
5. When you choose a non-English language interface, you are asking the site to substitute 'on the fly' the relevant variable with its new value

To make a new language version of the FLOSS Manuals website you need to open the '.po' file and create a translation for every source phrase. To do this we have built some nice tools for you so you can do all of this editing from within the browser.

Images 

In addition to the text phrases which are managed with .po files, some of the interface elements are contained within images. We do this quite a bit with FLOSS Manuals because using images in the interface gives you more control over look and feel. So the localize tool set has some interesting possibilities for replacing images which contain texts.

CSS

Additionally, different languages may need some changes to the layout because there are different character sets used. For this our localize tools have a browser based stylesheet (CSS) editor.