Lodahl's blog: Localization

04 October 2009

Localization

Localizing a complex application like OpenOffice.org is much more than just translating the user interface.

The Danish community has for years been working on several strings: We must of cause keep up with translating the application. Right now we are in a working on translation of version 3.2. We have more than 73.000 strings at the moment. We would very much like to get the manuals from OOoAuthers translated too. Unfortunately we haven't been able to keep up with versions lately.

Language tools are very important to our development. A few years ago we took a big step against an improved spelling dictionary and we are still working on that. The thesaurus was released about one year ago and right now we are working on getting a more academic approach thus we are trying to get an existing research project from University of Copenhagen implemented as the future thesaurus in OpenOffice.org. The idea is to implement what is already existing instead of developing it our selves. That way we can concentrate on the important thing like initiate new improving projects.

The latest news is, that a few guys in the community has succeded to create a Danish prof of concept of the LanguageTool: Grammar checker!



We are looking forward to see the results of this work. At this moment we are talking about a testimplementation with only a few grammar rules. But it looks great so far!

2 comments:

Goran Rakić said...

Congratulations to the Danish OpenOffice.org community!

Support for Danish language in the LT will be a valuable contribution for every OpenOffice.org user out there. I hope you will be able to get new rules and extend it from the user's feedback.

Keep a great work!

Dwayne Bailey said...

Congrats. It's a lot of work to give full coverage to a language, so well done to all the participants.

You might want to try odf2xliff to see if that helps ease the translation of OOo documents.