Print

Print


*From the Hyku team–The Digital Public Library of America
<https://dp.la/>, Stanford University <https://www.stanford.edu/>,
and DuraSpace <http://duraspace.org/>*

June 26, 2017
Read it online: http://bit.ly/2rUCdUM
Contact: [log in to unmask]

*Expanded Language Support in Hyku*

It’s the week of Open Repositories 2017 <https://or2017.net/>, the annual
international conference for delegates from research libraries and other
institutions around the globe to meet up (this year in lovely Bribane,
Australia), and share their latest challenges and advances. We can’t think
of a better time to highlight Hyku’s support for a growing number of
languages in the application UI. We are up to seven!

With English as the starting point, we added Spanish, and soon thereafter
Chinese, with the generous contributions of translations provided by native
speakers in the Samvera community. Then we got a tip about i18n-tasks
<https://github.com/glebm/i18n-tasks>. This Ruby gem identifies any missing
terms from languages specified in an application’s locale configuration
file and then fills in the gaps with values obtained from Google Translate.
This simple process makes it amazingly easy to add support for multiple
languages. With this enhancement to Hyku, it is now possible to also read
the UI in German, French, Italian, and Portuguese.

The results have been pretty accurate, though on occasion the Google
Translate results are a little off, not perfectly reflecting the nuance of
meaning in certain UI terms (e.g., “home” page is a starting point, not
where the “house” is located :), so a pass for quality control is
necessary. We are grateful to those members of our community who have
pitched in with corrections as they came across instances of
mistranslation. (Keep them coming!)

Expanded language support is fundamental for any repository service today
that aims to serve a global audience of users. With the power of web
services like Google Translate, language barriers can dissolve!

-- 
Carol Minton Morris
Communications and Marketing Director
DuraSpace
duraspace.org
607 592-3135 <(607)%20592-3135>