Thursday Jul 24, 2008
This post follows on from Language Support On Docs.sun.com
Docs.sun.com hosts a vast amount of documentation in many languages.
However, the localized content has not always been easy to access. - The docs.sun site just doesn't make it easy to ascertain if a particular English book is available in your language.
Typically you have to re-navigate the product tree in your chosen language, just to see if the book has been translated. This at best, could be described as tedious.
So now, we've implemented translation linking [similar to what we did on the BigAdmin last year. Example].
That is, now on docs.sun, every book automatically cross-links to the translations of that book.
This should significantly improve the 'findability' of our translated content.
This effort took quite some time, since the data that mapped the translations to each other, was scattered in many places, in many formats.
Examples:
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-1337?l=es
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-0544?l=en
Note - we can only link from book to book; we cannot link from page to page. This is because of the way docs.sun.com dynamically serves content at runtime - with sometimes unpredictable URLs.
Tuesday Jul 22, 2008
The group of Sun's bloggers that write about globalization is growing rapidly, which is good. There are now tens of blogs you can watch to get the latest insights of globalization bloggers, which is not so good assuming you don't have all the blogs bookmarked.
To improve the quality of our reader's life, Sun has introduced planets.sun.com website. Any Sun employee can set up a planet on their own. A planet is a selection blogs which are consolidated on a single web page. It uses the RSS feed of each blog to watch for changes and when a new entry is posted it copies it to the planet. By visiting a single planet, you get the latest blog entries from a group of carefully selected blogs.
Sounds cool? There's even more than that. A planet can gather not only blogs, but almost any source of content with an RSS feed, such as mailing list entries or media posted by Sun employees via the Mediacast.
Melanie Gao has already set up a Globalization Community Content planet at http://planets.sun.com/globalization/ which features Globalization Blogs and Globalization Forums. Now you can monitor the globalization-related traffic at one site only. Enjoy!
Thursday Jul 17, 2008
Sun has a big globalization department that handles the localization for Sun's hardware and software products. As well, the group is involved in web site localization, developing internationalization features for Solaris and other products, internationalization audits, and many other related tasks. We work in close partnership with product development teams, marketing, engineering, technical publications, and support and services, in helping drive worldwide usage and adoption. We are globally represented with staff in the U.S, China, Japan, Czech Republic, Ireland, Germany and India.
This group blog has been silent for nearly a year. Did you know that Sun has a globalization technical topic where you can find all kinds of useful information for internationalizing your products? Check it out. It will soon be revamped and adding more features, functionality and content over the next few months.
Now, I extend TWO invitations: 1) to the Sun Globalization team to become more active in blogging here; 2) to YOU, the developer, sysadmin, globalizer, localizer; in short, anyone and everyone interested in taking their products global and learning more about localization or internationalization topics.
Please let us know what kind of information, news, topics, and ideas you are interested in seeing here in this blog.
Monday Oct 01, 2007
If you are one, please read on and help me out here.
As I wrote in my earlier blog, I'm using Solaris 70b on Parallels desktop on Mac. Everything's working fine, except for the Time and Date stamp. Somehow the stamp on Parallels slowly goes back to past as time passes. I tried to synchronize with Internet server, by checking the box in
Administration > Time and Date > Periodically synchronize with Internet servers
with the time.apple.com as the server. It asks me for root password and synchronizes the time and date immediately. However, the problem persists after a few minutes. Time is not going as fast as it's supposed to. :-)
Another option I tried is to uncheck the "Periodically ..." box, but clicked on Synchronize Now button. Again it synchronizes the time and date immediately at that moment, but goes back to an odd timezone that I can not figure out.
Any ideas?
Thursday Sep 27, 2007
OpenSolaris.org Korean Portal project is looking for a leader(s). Jay who had volunteered for the position and also to lead the Korean OS.o language community seems no longer available for the job. Thanks, Jay, for the work done so far. So interested persons are encouraged to reply to Jim's email in i18n-discuss at opensolaris dot org.
Tuesday Sep 25, 2007
I started working from home since last week. I got a brand new Macbook and Parallels on which I decided to install the latest Solaris Express Developer Edition. Well, my manager required that I do, kind of... strongly.
The first time I ever tried to install Solaris on my laptop was a couple of years ago and got stuck rather in the beginning of the process with acronyms and commandline interface. It took several hours of attempt to find my way through installation with no avail. I remember spending the next few days trying to recover the Windows XP on the Vaio I was using at the time where I didn't have the recovery CD. Since then I assumed that installing Solaris is something for engineers and have been satisfied with the version that Sun IT provides on our desktop in the offices.
So when I finally decided to install snv_70b on my home laptop a week ago, I was dearly holding onto my PC as a backup, thinking that my new Mac wouldn't be usable until a few days.
To my surprise, however, installation went quite intuitively. With the new GUI, it was, it really was, a breeze. After some initial steps of a few minutes, installation procedure started. We went out for dinner and when we came back an hour or so later, it was all done and complete. And I didn't have to ask for a technical support. I kept asking my husband -who is also a Sunnie and an engineer-, "Is this really done?"
Now how do I change the Time and Date stamp correctly on Parallels?!
Tuesday Sep 04, 2007
I once heard that the three biggest changes in one's life are -I think- marriage/divorce, birth/death, and moving (cross country or continent). In the past 1 year, I experienced two of these, at least to some degree. I got married and saw my husband (boyfriend back then) plan and move for a job change all the way from Germany to US. Since then I (we) moved from a place where I had lived with my mom for 8 years, and last but not least, we're expecting the third change - birth of our first baby in December. Quite a lot in the past year, I must admit.
Slowly I'm getting into the routine of it all. We celebrated the first anniversary of our marriage just a couple of weekends ago... already. I'm grateful for that. It's been a wonderful year!
Wednesday Aug 29, 2007
Did you know that they can go on BigAdmin? Just click the Submit Content to BigAdmin link there. There's a drop-down menu in the Language field where you can choose one of the four languages including English. Cool thing, that is. :-)
Thursday Aug 09, 2007
OS.o I18n/L10n Community started working on the next Starter Kit project. We're adding new content that's related to building OpenSolaris and adding new languages to the Kit (Italian, German, Polish):
1-OpenSolaris Developer's Reference Guide
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/on/devref_toc/
2-Rich Teer's Building OpenSolaris
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/tools/building_opensolaris/
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/tools/building_opensolaris_part2
3-Improving OpenSolaris
http://opensolaris.org/os/communities/participation/
4-Development Process
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/on/os_dev_process/
Unlike previous times that we localized the Starter Kit, translation will be done in collaboration with Sun Globalization and non-Sun I18n/L10n community members. For Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese, translation of these build documents has begun by two volunteers. We also have a question whether the Starter Kit can take language contributions for languages other than the ones we're planning, like French, for example. The SK team discussed having the latest and the greatest translations available from the SK project website for people to download. If/When this structure becomes available, we can have as many translations as community produces as downloadables.
More discussions are taking place in starterkit-discuss at opensolaris dot org, and to some extent, in i18n-discuss at opensolaris dot org.
Wednesday Jun 20, 2007
It's been almost half a year since Multi-lingual Glossary project was opened on OS.o (Dec 2006). And I was pleasantly surprised some days ago to find out that many terms and definitions have been translated into Turkish by a community contributor named Suleyman Senturk (username: Suleyman)!
Not only Turkish is a new addition to our collection of languages for the glossary, but also the contributor is a student. Those of us who started the project had a vision that the project would develop to wonderful reference for Solaris technology. So I thought, I'd interview Suleyman who made my day! Here's his response:
I'm a university student. I'm educating computer engineering. I haven't got experience with programming. I'm interested in translations before some other softwares (small applications). Also I'm interest with open source OS, softwares etc. I read an article somewhere about Sun Solaris free DVDs and I fill the form after take tour on Solaris site and saw translations section. I signed up and start to translate definitions and words which I know. These time I haven't got a lot of time for translation because I'm very busy with my exams :( .
At the nearest the time I will publish an article about Solaris and Internationalization project at my blog and all other important sites which publish in Turkish. My English Skill not well I hope I will develop myself I will help that time much more. But I'm sure in Turkey there are more people with interest translating and I'm sure some people are better than me. But I will be a pioneer :).
Great job! Thanks, with my hat off.
Tuesday Mar 20, 2007
A colleague forwarded me this interesting site that tells me how much my blog site is worth. I thought I'd try, but didn't think I'd publish the result. I expected to see 25 cents, maybe a dollar... Not too bad:
Thursday Mar 08, 2007
OpenSolaris 2월달 뉴스레터에 Starter Kit을 무료로 제공한다는 소식이 났습니다. 변변치 않은 실력이지만 한글로 번역을 해 본다면, 다음과 같습니다.
Sun이 OpenSolaris Starter Kit 주문을 받습니다. 세계 대부분의 지역에 우편이 가능하니 신청해서 무료로 받아보세요. Starter Kit 배너 광고를 사용해서 OpenSolaris Starter Kit에 대한 선전을 돕거나, Starter Kit 프로젝트에 참여하실 수도 있습니다.
Monday Mar 05, 2007
These seven words can be summed up in a single word "chary" in the Tuvan language, according to a recent news article. Supposedly only 35 of the 426 Chulym people speak their native language.
The world's languages are disappearing at a pace faster than the extinction of biological species. And so what? Who cares about Tuvan anyway?
We all should. With the loss of language, we forever lose some amount of human knowledge, not to mention cultural diversity.
Sun's Globalization Group is not preserving world languages or preventing human knowledge from dying. That we leave to the academics. However, we are working towards making Sun's products available in a growing number of languages. Internationalization and Localization are an important part of our meeting Sun customer needs.
Information about Sun Globalization.
For more information about this topic:
When Languages Die
The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge
by K. David Harrison
Monday Mar 05, 2007
Janice graciously changed the background design of this G11n blog to have refreshing green eco look. I like it a lot. Thanks, Janice.
Monday Dec 18, 2006
My husband and I made an offer for a house the other day. We had made offers for other houses before, but for one reason or another, they had all fallen through. (For those who are not familiar, purchasing a house works like an auction in Northern California.) So when we finally found this house, I thought it was for a good reason that the others had not worked. The house was nicely remodeled to fit our taste, and our offer was even the only one that the sellers had in hand at the time, which was unusual with houses in clean condition. Everything looked pretty promising, and I started rolling my imagination. I placed furniture in the living room and seated a group of friends who I would invite for a party at the house (this is a fun part of house hunting for me, although it could make you more disappointed if you don't get the house).
So it was only shocking, when we saw the inspection report a few days later. They found a huge termite damage in the foundation, and to repair the damage, part of the house -which was beautifully remodeled and brand new- had to be torn down almost completely.
In the translation world, glossary is like a foundation. A good glossary helps translators ensure consistent usage of terminology throughout a large book. It helps translators understand the term correctly, thereby enabling more precise translation and usage. With multiple applications on your computer, it is glossary that makes File the File everywhere -in your language, including English.
OpenSolaris needs such a glossary. Not only terms and the translations, but also good explanation of them. We can start that glossary in the OS.o multi-lingual glossary project. If you've ever used a wiki, it's quite easy to get started. If you haven't, learning how to use wiki isn't bad, either.
Do you speak a language? Check it out today! :-)
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