Eduardo Jezierski and the team at InSTEDD have been leading an incredible effort to translate and localize the Sahana humanitarian aid system to Burmese. They were nearly complete when they took the stage this week at Where2.0 (video soon), and it looks like they have finished the last line.
Ed explained the effort on the InSTEDD blog:
Juan was instrumental in getting the Debian virtualized image running well on our Red Hat host OS, thank you! The compressed Sahana VM is about 300mb, which will allow a quick re-deployment of a hardened configuration in Myanmar as necessary. I think this VM would be a good asset to keep around, allowing anyone running Windows or Linux to bring up a running Sahana server with little to no effort.
[…]Translation is hard – especially for the fonts and encodings to work together. See the awesome burglish site to see what I mean… the translated docs end up having strings like tcef;u¾rsm; which is really encoded Wwin_burmese, which would look like this with Padauk
Burglish project
One of the main issues with the localization is that it isn’t just about translating strings- there is also a need to accept input in the right format. This isn’t trivial with all combinations of fonts and input methods people use, and especially not trivial on a web page that has to work in multiple browsers!
This was an incredible effort by an amazing team. Good work, and thank you!