International ILIAS Blog
English-language blog on ILIAS with news and background information
News from the SIG Language Support
Suittenpointner, Florian [suittenpointner] - 2. Mar 2017, 11:52
The SIG Lanuage Support has made some further steps towards realizing its objectives. This articles gives an overview of the most important ones.
Multiliguality of Repository Objects
Regarding the enhanced multiliguality of repository objects, there is a Feature Wiki article that will be presented to both the next developer conference (09. Mär 2017, 10:00 - 18:00: 27. in Aachen) and the Advisory Council (one day before), in order to get approval and funding for its realization:
There are two more Feature Wiki articles which are quite ready for decision making but, by now, lack an idea how to find the necessary funding:
Finally, there is a Feature Wiki article yet to be discussed:
Multilingual Container Objects
Beyond title/description and page editor, there are a lot of further input fields in container objects, e.g., "Course Relevant User Data" / "Course Information" or "Taxonomies", "Custom Metadata" and "News".
Regarding the enhanced multiliguality of repository objects, there is a Feature Wiki article that will be presented to both the next developer conference (09. Mär 2017, 10:00 - 18:00: 27. in Aachen) and the Advisory Council (one day before), in order to get approval and funding for its realization:
- Multilingual Input Element: The idea behind this proposal is to introduce a specific type of text input field that offers special GUI to complete it in different languages. This type of field should be provided in a centralized way, so developers are able to simply adopt it into their code. The effort for this development is currently estimated by Alexander Killing.In parallel, there is an interesting development for plugin metadata by studer&raimann that could be a solution.
There are two more Feature Wiki articles which are quite ready for decision making but, by now, lack an idea how to find the necessary funding:
- Multilingual Titles and Descriptions for All Object Types + Plugins: Title and description fields of any object type should offer multilingual completion. In case the "Multilingual Input Element" (s. above) can be introduced, the effort for this would surely be manageable.
- Multilingual Page Editor for Container Objects: All types of containers in ILIAS are offering a so-called page editor. However, by now only categories allow to enter language-dependent page content.A special issue in this proposal will be courses, as they are featuring additional GUIs like with the objective-driven view.Anyway, this proposal has a lot of potential, as language-sensitive start pages can lead users in corresponding language-specific content objects (like tests or learning modules), so a lot of development for multilingual functionality in content objects could be spared, as content objects wouldn't need to be multilingual.
Finally, there is a Feature Wiki article yet to be discussed:
Multilingual Container Objects
Beyond title/description and page editor, there are a lot of further input fields in container objects, e.g., "Course Relevant User Data" / "Course Information" or "Taxonomies", "Custom Metadata" and "News".
Multilingual Online Help
A working group evaluated several approaches regarding this objective (s. minutes).
The currently most promising one is to use the existing option to export ILIAS learning modules for translation purposes (and re-importing the result, s. the documentation) in combination with a web-based translation tool.
Currently, our application is running for the community of the Google Translator, as this would provide us with a powerful tool (far beyond what is available outside this community) without any need for funding.