No other way to say it: Pentaho Community is the best in the world. A while back I sent an email to a few people with a "small" challenge:
So what's this all about? The difference is in the way we're doing it...
Internationalization (i18n) is a very challenging project. It's insanely hard not only to guarantee that everything is translated but also that the translation itself has quality. What we've been doing so far is bundle a default set at release time, but that has implications:
Unfortunately, the language bundles aren't pluggable; they follow strict rules and methodology varies. Message files for the solution, javascript files for some UI, some files are inside plugins and others in the server itself... It's an heavy logic to implement if we were to put this on a plugin. Logic that would require an application to handle the language bundles installation process. And we would need to build that application. We'd need a Pentaho Application Builder. Oh! Wait! What was that Sparkl thing again? ;)
So we worked collaboratively with a newly formed group of translators - we prepared a bundle to ease the process of translation and worked on an application to install those bundles on the server.
The prepared bundle included not only the Pentaho platform files but also the plugins - all the plugins available at the time, both Community Lane and Customer Lane.
And today we release 6 of those Language Pack Installers for Pentaho 5: Dutch, French, Hindi, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian variant) and Spanish.
This language packs are available from the Pentaho Marketplace:
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Installing the language packs is now a two step operation. First, we download an installer from the marketplace
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Once we download the installer, we need to restart the server for it to pick up the changes. After logging in again, we'll have a new option on the Tools menu to access the installer. This is what will place the translation files on the relevant places:
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After running the installer we need to do another reboot for the changes to be picked up. 2 reboots, I know, but currently there's no other way around. The Pentaho devs are working on this issue, implementing an OSGI layer on the platform so we no longer need this steps!
You should now have a new entry in the Language menu, and selecting it will... just work!
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Also note that, since we're copying the translation files to the appropriate places, there will be times where you'll need to run the installers again, for instance if you upgrade a certain plugin
Seeing the output of this work also makes me extremely embarrassed to realize that the Ctools don't have i18n support. Definitely something we need to fix asap!
Hey - would you be willing in working with us in translating Pentaho to your native language?The answers were absolutely amazing - all on the lines of: Let's do it! And they did it! The first set is available!
Translation Challenges
Let me first describe what this is about - and why I'm extremely excited about this project. Pentaho already has support for localization since... well, since the beginning, so this part isn't exactly new. Lot's of partners or even customers translate Pentaho in their installations. And if you go to the standard Pentaho installation, you'll see some languages available there, bundled by Pentaho.So what's this all about? The difference is in the way we're doing it...
Internationalization (i18n) is a very challenging project. It's insanely hard not only to guarantee that everything is translated but also that the translation itself has quality. What we've been doing so far is bundle a default set at release time, but that has implications:
- Development is focused on a single language, and release schedules sometimes don't allow a proper translation period
- Bugs in the translations are only fixed on the next release / patch release
- Hard to contribute
- Only the core product is translated. External plugins are not
Unfortunately, the language bundles aren't pluggable; they follow strict rules and methodology varies. Message files for the solution, javascript files for some UI, some files are inside plugins and others in the server itself... It's an heavy logic to implement if we were to put this on a plugin. Logic that would require an application to handle the language bundles installation process. And we would need to build that application. We'd need a Pentaho Application Builder. Oh! Wait! What was that Sparkl thing again? ;)
Language Pack Installers
So we worked collaboratively with a newly formed group of translators - we prepared a bundle to ease the process of translation and worked on an application to install those bundles on the server.
The prepared bundle included not only the Pentaho platform files but also the plugins - all the plugins available at the time, both Community Lane and Customer Lane.
And today we release 6 of those Language Pack Installers for Pentaho 5: Dutch, French, Hindi, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian variant) and Spanish.
This language packs are available from the Pentaho Marketplace:
Installing the language packs is now a two step operation. First, we download an installer from the marketplace
Once we download the installer, we need to restart the server for it to pick up the changes. After logging in again, we'll have a new option on the Tools menu to access the installer. This is what will place the translation files on the relevant places:
After running the installer we need to do another reboot for the changes to be picked up. 2 reboots, I know, but currently there's no other way around. The Pentaho devs are working on this issue, implementing an OSGI layer on the platform so we no longer need this steps!
You should now have a new entry in the Language menu, and selecting it will... just work!
Caveats
There are some open issues. Along this process we found some items that are not "localizable". We created Jira's along the way and they will be addressed.Also note that, since we're copying the translation files to the appropriate places, there will be times where you'll need to run the installers again, for instance if you upgrade a certain plugin
Seeing the output of this work also makes me extremely embarrassed to realize that the Ctools don't have i18n support. Definitely something we need to fix asap!
Credits
The translators were amazing! Absolutely amazing! They were able to keep up with my totally random deadline! This were the ones that made this release possible:- Dutch: Cees van Kemenade
- French: Sylvain Decloix
- Hindi: InfoAxon Technologies
- Korean: Xavier Cho
- Portuguese: Oncase, Open Consulting
- Spanish: Domingo Lavin
Submitting a bug / improving the translations
This initial release won't be perfect - but with fast iterations we'll get there! If you find any issues with the translations please report them. Better yet, attach the translations! We'll make the fix available to everyone as soon as possibleHelping us with a new language
This is the first set! We hope to have available the following set of languages soon:- Italian
- German
- Japanese
- Polish
- Russian
- Swedish