In many software projects that need to support multiple languages, the software developers and the translators are different persons and have to find a way how to work with each other.
The software development team needs:
- conventions how to maintain the locale texts
- an easy mechanism to exchange files with the translator(s)
- flexible ways to use the locale files, validate them, compare, generate sources for different programming languages, and more…
The translator needs:
- a robost and easy tool to edit the text (to provide new translations), mostly for a specific language only
- an obvious way to see, which entries might need a review when working for new releases on a large file
Therefore, we have developed some tools, called NLS tools (NLS=national language support) that help you with these tasks. We provide the tools to develop internationalizable software (in different programming languages).
The NLS tools have been released as open-source under http://code.google.com/p/nlstools/.
You can maintain the locale texts either in XML or Excel and easily convert between these (and other) formats. The development team can mark some entries as “to be reviewed” and merge, compare the results from the translator into their source files.
We encourage you to take a look into the project with its examples.