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.
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