Wanted: Gettext Volunteer(s)
In the three days since PledgeBank launched we’ve had lots of people from around the world asking if they could help translate the site into other languages. We’d love for this to happen, but in order to do so the site needs to be adapted to work in different tongues. The system we plan to use is gettext, and we’re looking for a volunteer to take a lead on making this happen. So if you’ve direct experience with gettext, or you think you could bend it to your will, please get in touch.
Hey there.
I’ve no time until around 6th July to do the coding, but I can offer you a portugese translation from a professional translator that lives with me.
If you can wait till the 6th, I’m up for the coding……
Is Pledgebank open-source? I ask because it’d make it eligible for using Rosetta, which may help a lot on the organisation side.
Yes, all mySociety projects are open source, under the Affero GPL, other than those bits of data (not code) which we have under licence for other people like the Ordnance Survey.
The thing we most need help in is with coding skills. i.e. implenting gettext in our source code. In particular, I’m not sure of the best way to do that with text mixed up with HTML. Anyone have any advice, or suggest any web projects in PHP which have done localisation well?
Is there any specific need to use gettext?
I’ve worked on web projects offering multiple translations, and we’ve just used placeholders, a couple of database tables, and a language selection cookie (or a session variable). It’s not as formal as gettext but it’s probably a darn sight easier to implement, and should fit into the existing HTML/PHP mix a little easier.