Support for Dutch localisation

[Niels-NTG]

Dear SEB team,

At this moment my colleagues and I at Dedact are looking into using Safe Exam Browser for making exams within our web-based e-learning platform Learnbeat.

The prototypes we have made thus far show a lot of promise, such that we would like to have Dutch localisation, since most of our clients are located in The Netherlands. We could do the localisation ourselves. We were wondering if the SEB team is willing to support an nl localisation in the normal release of SEB for MacOS and the other platforms if we provide one.

Niels

[danschlet]

de.xliff.zip

Dear Niels,

Thank you for contacting us and offering to contribute a Dutch localization. We would be happy to support an nl localization in the general releases of SEB. One of the open tasks on our development roadmap is to localize SEB to languages required by important user groups of SEB. So it is highly welcome if companies/institutions, which are or want to use SEB in a larger scale, contribute localizations. There are some important aspects to consider when someone wants to offer to contribute a localization:

• We would require the localization for all platforms SEB supports, so macOS, iOS and Windows. We will make this as easy as possible, by exporting all text strings which need to be translated into a .xliff standard format file. Ideally we would have one file containing the strings for all platform versions of SEB, we have to investigate if this will be possible.
• We would expect some level of commitment to keep the localization up-to-date. That means you should be able to quickly add translations for new or changed strings when we're preparing a new SEB release. It wouldn't look good and decreases usability if we have to release a SEB version where some new strings are not yet localized and they are displayed in English instead.

For demonstration purposes I attached a .xliff file for the current developer version of SEB 2.1.3 for macOS with the original English strings and the German translations. It doesn't contain yet all strings for SEB 2.1.3, as we're still working on this release. But you can see the amount of text which will have to be translated. I'm using the simple but quite effective tool "Counterparts Lite" to edit those files (available in the Mac App Store).

Please feel free to contact us directly (info at safeexambrowser.ch).

Daniel

[danschlet]

We might consider offering a possibility to localize only student-facing UI strings. A large part of the strings contained in the de.xliff file I sent before are displayed in the Preferences window. Although it's always better if an app is completely localized, in the case of SEB it might be ok to only localize the strings which end users (examinees) see. A localized Preferences window/SEB Config Tool ideally would also require to localize our SEB manuals, which would be more work than we or most contributors can manage.

[Niels-NTG]

After reviewing your example .xliff file we quickly came to the conclusion that we currently don't have the resources for a complete translation. Having to only localise the student-facing UI would be a great compromise. Looking forward to any future developments in this direction!

[danschlet]

We will let you know, probably we will start using this student-facing localization system when we work on SEB 2.2 for macOS/iOS later this summer (and in the Windows 3.0 refactoring).

[pkarjala]

Jumping in on this comment train; we would be interested in a student-facing localization for Hawaiian Language use. This would primarily focus on Modal windows messages and buttons such as cancel, OK, and the password prompts that appear when the user attempts to quit, reload, navigate to start, and so forth.

If a github repository is created for localization for the SEB project (independent of the Mac or Windows versions), we could fork it and put in a merge request for language updates. This might make the work easier for folks who want to collaborate on different parts of the UI for different languages. As long as a README.md file was included in the repo with instructions on required formatting, we would be good to go.

Absolute best would be if we could then test that same localization file using a release version of SEB. An option in the Preferences / Settings could be used to select a localization based on the available localization files on the system, and then those changes would reflect on restart without requiring a compile of the program. I realize this is a bit more complex.

[danschlet]

We will look into how to consolidate localizations (which are currently done separately for macOS/iOS and Windows. A separate repository for localization sounds like a good idea, but we need to find out how we could export localizations to that repository and import it back in a fairly automized way. I don't think though that it is feasible to do this completely automatically, partially technical preconditions are missing. For example supporting macOS 10.7 (no Base Internationalization available) and maybe also 10.8/10.9 (really bad/quite bad auto layout support) doesn't allow to add additional languages fully automated.

I also don't think it's currently feasible to add a feature to exchange localizations on the fly. This would require additional code and we still have to set priorities due to limited resources. Also if the platform doesn't support that out of the box, I don't think it makes sense to implement a non-standard solution ourselves.

We will tag/separate student-facing localizations and those strings only necessary for exam administrators as mentioned. But what we definitely won't do is to release a student-facing localization in SEB which is only partial. Either a contributor commits to translate all student-facing strings (also in updates) or we won't add a localization at all. Partially or otherwise poorly (Google Translator...) translated apps are a no-go!

The only exception which is acceptable if it is common in a local language to mix for example English terms and such in the local language (but we would fact-check that first...).

Otherwise people can still fork SEB if they want to do partial translations. But we have some quality standards which we don't want to compromise on.