Monday, April 28, 2008

This Week in Django 20

with hosts Michael Trier and Brian Rosner

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This Week in Django is a weekly podcast about all things Django. This week’s show is a huge show with lots of great features.

This is the second part of a two part series on Internationalisation. This week we are privileged to talk to Marc Garcia, Django’s Catalan translator, among many other things. Marc discusses the localisation side of things, helping us understand what’s required to get your web site localised.

Additionally, we also talk about QuerySet Refactor branch having been merged to trunk.

Finally, we have a special full length song by Django’s own Adrian Holovaty. It’s amazingly beautiful, so I encourage you to stay tuned for it.

Note: We apologize for the occasional audio drops during the interview with Marc Garcia. That’s just how these things go when calling across the globe.

Also, We’ve modified the compression scheme a bit, so let us know if the sound is better or worse.

Please see the Show Notes below for all the pertinent information and links

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Show Notes

Big News (0:55)

QuerySet-Refactor Branch Merged!

As Malcolm Tredinnick mentioned on last week’s show, the Queryset-Refactor branch has been merged into trunk. Changeset 7477 makes that happen.

Over the past several months we have giving you a lot of information on the changes that contained in the Queryset Refactor modifications. We plan to get into those things more in next weeks show.

Adrian Holovaty Special Song

At the end of the program we will be presenting a special song by Adrian Holovaty. So stay tuned for that.

Special Feature – Localisation (5:21)

This week we are honored to be able to speak with Marc Garcia. Marc is the founder and CTO of Accopensys, a software development solutions company. Marc also maintains a blog called the The Best of Marc Garcia.

Marc has also been heavily involved in doing:

  • many translations on Catalan and Spanish languages,
  • main development of Spanish localflavor,
  • development of Transdb (http://code.google.com/p/transdb/) that allows Django field translations on database, and
  • development of some small multilanguage web sites using Django

On last week’s program Malcolm Tredinnick gave us some great information on internationalisation. This week we are going to get into localisation, which as I understand it is the process of translating a product into different languages or adapting a language for a specific country or region.

Translating Django

  • Let us start off with looking at translating Django itself. What is the process involved for localising Django internals?
  • What specific language elements cause you problems? Malcolm had touched on difficulty with pluralisation. Would you comment on that and possibly other areas that present special challenges?
  • What sort of resources are available to translators?
  • In the area of translating Django, are there specific changes that you feel should be made in order to make the whole process better and easier for translators?
  • Last week we discussed some problems with Django documentation and slang that is used, etc… causing problems for getting things translated. What perspective do you have about this?

Translating Websites

  • There’s two template tags, trans and blocktrans for translating strings in the template. What is the difference between the two and how would you decide to use one or the other?
  • What about translating database content? How is that achieved?
  • I recently ran across the django-rosetta project on google code. It is a very impressive admin screen for doing translation. Have you used this project? Are there any similar types of tools to assist translators?
    • Poedit – a cross-platform gettext catalogs (.po files) editor.
    • Msgfmt – a Unix utility that creates message object files from portable object files.

Miscellaneous

  • Anything else that we didn’t cover that you would like to mention?

Community Catchup (48:49)

Thank You! (1:05:50)

Special Song by Adrian Holovaty

Radiohead is holding a “contest” called Radiohead Remix, in which they’re inviting fans to remix the song called “Nude” from their latest album. They’ve released the raw tracks and are encouraging people to remix the tracks to create something different.

So Adrian sat down and did his own jazzy acoustic mix, and we asked him if we could play it for the show. His remix is called “Nude (jazzy acoustic),” and if you like it, please vote for it.

More Information

Keep track of Brian Rosner at his website

Comments - 3 people have already said something. Join the discussion.

  • kevin said…

    thanks guys for the django-nyc nod. another great podcast.

    and no worries - you actually said my name correctly :)

    cheers!

  • akaihola said…

    Marc mentioned that it's possible to translate longer blocks of mixed text and HTML tags with {% blocktrans %}.

    I see the real benefit of {% blocktrans %} in the ability to include references to template variables. They become placeholders in the translation strings and enable the translator to alter the structure of the sentence (e.g. change the order of the variable placeholders, a common case when different languages have different subject-predicate-object order).

    It's also possible to specify separate singular and plural forms for the sentence.

    See http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/i18n/#in-template-code for more information.

  • Orestis Markou said…

    I have implemented a django application that deals with dates:

    http://code.google.com/p/django-localdates/

    I'm using it in my blog and akaihola (see above) has contributed the finnish date formats. It's easily extensible through django's translation mechanisms, and if there are date forms that can't be handled through that you can define your own special placeholders.