Adapt Learning Community: Localizing the authoring tool

Hi,

Does anyone have any experience localizing the authoring tool? My organization is interested in trying out framework and the authoring tool, but as a government organization in a bilingual country we would need to have the tool menus available in both English and French.

I have limited experience and know-how in coding and am wondering what level of effort would be required to set the tool up with a language switching menu. For example, is there one file for all the menu item text or would we have to translate the text in multiple .js files?

If switching language in the tool is too ambitious, would it be feasible to have two instances of the authoring tool share the same db? For example, one author launches French a version and another launches an English version and both see the same courses and assets.

I imagine that the tagging and descriptions of the assets may have to be in both languages when they are uploaded. I also figure plug-in descriptions will have to be made bilingual as well.

We have coders to work on this and will definitely share our work, but my boss has asked me to scope this out first.

Cheers,

Neil

Hi Neil,

The approach to localisation is to create a file in the lang directory in the AT. Notice there exists a spanish one as well as the english. If you create a french one here and then change the installation to point to this file by modifying this line. Once done, it would be great if your coders could create a pull request to share their translated file with the community so other users may benefit from it.

As for on the fly language switching that feature has not been created and I feel like it would be quite tricky to do, Brian Quinn or Tom Taylor may be able to correct me here. But I can't see why you couldn't have two versions of the AT pointed towards the same database.

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Thanks, Simon.

This information helps so much!

If we do go forward with this, we'll definitely share the translated file.

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Hi Neil,

As it is today, the authoring tool doesn't have multi-language support (either in the interface, or the output content). As Simon's said, some labels are dynamic, but more work needs to be done.

This is a feature we're eager to get in asap, and at least one of core collaborating companies has a big need for this, so we've already pencilled in a milestone to tackle this (as soon as we can secure some developer resource!). However, due to the existing priorities and commitments the core team has made, this isn't likely to be attempted until late in the year (maybe longer).

If you have the resource to available to take this on, the Adapt team would be more than willing to help out in any way you need it, be it planning, development, or testing.

Gitter may be the best to discuss this in the first instance, with a view to perhaps setting up a call in the near future if our needs align?

https://gitter.im/adaptlearning/adapt_authoring

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