[squeak-dev] Squeak and i18n

Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de
Tue May 27 12:06:38 UTC 2008


On 27.05.2008, at 12:11, muyuubyou wrote:

> 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.

Indeed :)

> One thing that I still find lacking is squeak's internationalization  
> support.

That improved as well, considerably so.

> How is it there are no official images in other languages?

Because it's simpler to have just one image. The Etoys image uses the  
LocalePlugin so it can switch to the right locale on startup.

> 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.

The system supports unicode (that was the biggie in 3.8). You can use  
Freetype fonts now. There is experimental Pango support as well.

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

It downloads a Japanese font set. Etoys in Japanese is fine.

> 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.

We do have that. See class GetText* classes in the OLPC Etoys image.

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


Etoys uses the gettext format which is an open-source standard:

	http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/

Translation of Etoys and the base system is ongoing:

	https://dev.laptop.org/translate/projects/etoys/

There are already 4312 translatable phrases, and we're adding more.

This could be a nice basis for the squeak.org version, too. It just  
takes somebody to grab the code.

- Bert -





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