Copenhagen, 6 June 2006 EC CHM Multilinguality Anton Cupcea Finsiel Romania

2 Internationalization…  Internationalization (I18n): modification of an application so that it can handle multiple languages, countries, etc.:  Display content (web pages, files) in end user’s language  Display messages around the site in user’s language (e.g. “Home”, “Search”, error messages)  Input characters in end user’s language

3 …Internationalization  Print out the correct characters  Search information in certain language(s)  Allowing other web application, humans, search engines to pick up information in a certain language  index pages by language, have multilingual channels, URLs  Handling dates, numbers and sorting words using the rules of that language (not done in CHM portals, EU standardised)

4 Unicode  All portal pages are encoded utf-8 (Unicode implementation) because Unicode:  Incorporating it into applications and websites offers significant cost savings over the use of legacy character sets  Enables a single software product or a single website to be targeted across multiple platforms, languages and countries without re- engineering  Allows data to be transported through many different systems without corruption

5 utf-8 best practice  Naaya tools also work in Arabic on

6 Localization  Localization (l10n) involves taking a product and making it linguistically and culturally appropriate to the target locale (country/region and language)  Means to change the language on a Web site:  User selection  Detecting the browser settings  Automatically, based on the user’s profile  Translation issue:  Identifying un-translated or old translations of terms and phrases  Different roles for translators and content managers  Offering an interface for the content translation

7 Language negotiation  When information is not translated in the language selected by end users it is displayed:  In the local language of the browser, operating system if translation available  In the default language of the portal if translation available

8 EC CHM approach …  Default language – English  Define the list of languages you want to have for your website  Let users choose the language  Offer friendly interface for translating messages and labels that appear across the portal  Offer friendly interfaces for translating items of content (e.g. news, stories, documents)

9 … EC CHM approach  Collaborate: import/export the translation of labels and messages in one language in XML format  for widely-used languages (e.g. French, Spanish) the translation can be done once and used by many  Multilingual syndication  RDF channels in different languages  Multilingual glossaries