I haven't posted to the list in a few years but I think this is a very
important topic.

First of all, thanks to all developers and contributors for all the effort.
The improvement in the last 2 years has been nothing short of astonishing.

One thing that I still find lacking is squeak's internationalization
support. How is it there are no official images in other languages? How
about font packages for non-romanized alphabets? Given the amount of
international involvement there should at least be a version with some sort
of Unicode font (I realize that full Unicode fonts are huge). This is a show
stopper for a lot of people these days.

How is Squeak-jp working? because the Japanese kids will struggle to play
with etoys in English.

I've automated the localization of several software packages and I could
give a hand with this. We need some sort of extractor-injector of text
strings.

A propose using a CSV file in UTF-8 with the following information, for
every language:

TARGET_LANGUAGE_CODE.csv (for instance, en-us, en-uk, en-ca, fr-fr, fr-ca,
es-es, es-arg, es-uy, es-co, zh-tw, ru-ru, ru-ua, ua, jp, de-aut, de-ger,
etc...)
--------------------------------------------------

contents of en-us.csv:
string code(placeholder),  string, context
STR_WORLD_MENU_TITLE,World,WORLD_MENU
STR_INSPECT_MENU_INSPECT,Inspect,INSPECT_MENU
[...]

contents of es-es.csv:
string code(placeholder),  string, context
STR_WORLD_MENU_TITLE,Mundo,WORLD_MENU
[...]

contents of jp.csv:
string code(placeholder),  string, context
STR_WORLD_MENU_TITLE,$B@$3&(B,WORLD_MENU
[...]

contents of ru-ru.csv:
string code(placeholder),  string, context
STR_WORLD_MENU_TITLE,$B'^'Z'b(B,WORLD_MENU
[...]


... and so on.

Or whatever structure you like, just so you can sort by "context", "string"
or "placeholder" in OpenOffice, Excel or whatever sorts CSV files.

Sorry for the boring post.
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