Web-based Translation Framework Editor

The information on this article is deprecated since now exist translate.koha.org with Pootle.

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Hi folks, allow me to introduce myself. I'm Joshua Ferraro, the lead developer for LibLime (http://liblime.com), an Athens, OH software company that supports open-source software in libraries. I'm also the release manager for Koha, an open-source library automation system. Please feel free to drop me an email anytime <jmf at liblime dot com> or hop on IRC and say hello (I troll irc.freenode.net #code4lib and irc.katipo.co.nz #koha all hours of the day and night, my nick is 'kados' ).

Koha is an open-source integrated library automation system in use in hundreds of libraries world wide. The project is international and as such has a robust translation framework in place based on POT file stadard. Although Koha already uses POT files to generate translations of templates, but what the project lacks is an easy way for translators to submit translations.

The goal of this project would be to take the Kartouch project (http://l10n.kde.org/tools/kartouche/), as it exists, and modify it to suite the Koha project's needs. Eventually, once the software is stable, the Koha project will launch a translation website using this tool.

This translation framework system should allow the following:

• allow a new translator to sign up as a user
• allow a user to generate blank POT files to begin translating in their namespace (perhaps a combo of their user name and the language they are translating Koha into)
• allow a user to update their POT files as they change
• allow an administrator to access all the POT files
• allow an administrator to re-assign a POT file to another translator (in case someone abandons the language)
• allow an administrator to update the global POT files from which translators are updating their personal copies
• each version of Koha will need a separate set of POT files

• 100% free software – we're open-source nuts and won't settle for anything less than 100% free.
• 100% Web-based – the whole system, including management interface, should be web-based
• LAMP – the system myst be capable of running on Linux, Apache, MySQL, and one of the fast-prototyping scripting languages (Perl is preferred, but PHP or Python is OK too).
• Heavy on Documentation. This may just be a class for you, but we'll have to maintain this code for years. Please write very good documentation.