Internationalisation

Sahanapy should preferably use the combination of GNU/gettext + Pootle/translate toolkit + Babel for internationalization purposes:

• ​GNU Gettext
• ​Translate Toolkit & Pootle
• ​Babel

Justification:

• PO-based translation (GNU/gettext) works with both Sahana-PHP and Sahana-Python (one translation project applicable for both code bases)
• there is already a Pootle engine successfully run and well known by the Sahana community
• Babel tools support advanced message extraction methods (e.g. even from HTML templates)
• Babel library also supports localized date and number formatting which is very useful for the Sahana type of application
• Babel also integrates well with Trac
• Babel comes under BSD-like license, which is compatible to LGPL3.

Disadvantages:

• GNU/gettext does not support context tagging of message strings, so non-ambiguous terminology is a requirement
• Offline RAD would require extra software (all except Pootle, which can be replaced by any text editor) + perhaps extract/build scripts

Other options:

• ​LaunchPad Translations - access to Ubuntu community
• ​Web2Py - has it's own interface which is great for offline field RAD
• ​GoogleTranslate can be used to help translators get started, but needs humans to make cultural and linguistic refinements

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