Friday, February 25, 2011

Teaching an old dog new tricks

At #translatewiki.net, #Mifos had an infusion of all the messages of all its old modules. To provide the best possible support, localising only the latest software is not an option. The complete package has to be localised for it to work properly.

This sounds obvious and easy and yes, it is obvious but easy it is not. The existing messages are in a different format and had to be converted. Many messages did not pass the quality checks at translatewiki.net so they needed to be fixed or ignored.

The statistics of the lines of code give a good impression; the green line is the new code and, its messages were already available for localisation and the red line is the old code and its messages have just been added. The plan is to replace all the old code .


The size of the localisation opportunity that Mifos provides shows best in the number of modules and the number of messages per module. There are now so many of them that they no longer fit on a screen.

For the people who localise, this list provides the best illustration and to get this illustration, this old dog had to learn how to stitch several screen shots together. Luckily there are people in our community who are happy to teach me such operations using the GIMP.


When localisation is not your thing, you may want to consider this. You can help the users of Mifos and thereby the beneficiaries of microfinance by localising here.
Thanks,
      GerardM

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