Our last article brought you up to date on some aspects of our localization efforts. However the team working on integration with the translation service have not stood still. What have they accomplished since the last article? What are they currently working on? What do we intend in the future for localization in cPanel & WHM?
What the team has accomplished
The translation service wants data sent in an XML format, rather than YAML. Specifically the service uses the XLIFF DTD. The last few sprints were devoted to converting our internal tools to generate XLIFF.
The last big hurdle, completed recently, was supporting the quant function. As shown in the Maketext documentation, the quant function is a useful way of quantifying a noun. As different locales make quantifying complex in different ways, it required extra care, testing and coordination with the translation service provider.
What the team is currently working on
With our internal tools now able to generate XLIFF output for all the current phrases in cPanel & WHM the next step is testing the quality of the service. To do that we will submit a request for localization to Spanish (specifically Latin American Spanish, or locale es_419 ).
The testing will occur with the Spanish locale because:
- It has the most complete coverage of our non-English locales
- We have access to native speakers, from a variety of regions, that we can use to proof the quality of the result
If the resulting translation is at least as good as our current translation, we’ll move forward with submitting the rest of the plan introduced in our last article, namely:
- Restore the Japanese and Italian locales
- Have all our current locales proofed and improved
- Identify which locales we additionally need to provide
A lot depends upon how long it takes to go from beginning to end in the process. What is this process? In simple terms:
- Submit a set of phrases for translation into a specific locale
- Receive a machine translated fulfillment of the request
- Receive a human-proofed fulfillment of the request
Step 2 in the process is merely a stop gap to have full representation of all locales we provide. With the Login system for 11.32 you saw the result of this part of the process. By having at least machine translated phrases available in the product, we’ll be able to deliver to our customers regardless of how long it takes to produce a human-proofed version.
The goal is to deliver an updated set of Locales for 11.32, including the restoration of Japanese and Italian.
Where do we go from here?
One question that may come to mind is: could the XML Import and Export functions in WHM be converted to use XLIFF? We are considering this possibility, but it has not entered our plans as yet.
As someone interested in translating the cPanel & WHM interface, tools are important. Of more importance is the current interface be fully localizable. This means no hard coded strings. It also means transitioning away from the legacy system into the Locale system.
This is simple to solve for new features. They must be fully localizable. For existing code it’s a fairly complex undertaking. We’ll continue to improve the existing code base, striding toward full localization, as we deliver newer versions of cPanel & WHM.
