seanm1 said:
Hi Ali,
I'm just another student/teacher here, but I wanted to chime in. I don't think p2pu has any tools for putting things in other languages (which is called "internationalization" or "i18n" for short). But I've had some work in this and wanted to go over the process I used.
1. separate out all the stuff that has to "work" the way it's written - computer code, math, chess moves, poker hands, any kind of picture or diagram, you get the idea. We'll call this stuff "data".
2. Add to your data anything you don't know in advance - people's names, any input from them, version numbers, etc.
3. Give all that stuff a symbol. So for an image, you might use %i. It should make sense to you.
4. Copy all the rest of the source text into a text file. Use a 128 bit character set. So for English, this would be "plain text" ISO-8859-1.
5. Put all the symbols for the source into this file. What I mean here: put a %cc symbol in where computer code shows up in the original.
6. Split everything out into sentences and put lots of space between them.
7. Create an empty file using the character set you're translating to. It's easiest and best for security if you do some research online and don't use UTF-8. For example, Arabic is ISO-8859-6.
8. Copy one sentence over at a time and translate it, moving symbols where they would make sense grammatically
9. Replace the symbols with the data in the output file.
There are tools for doing this automatically with computer code, but you can use that method to translate anything. My favorite is gettext. As long as you can explain what the data symbols mean, you can also give the first file you made to anyone and get it translated even if they don't have any special knowledge in your field. Taking the first file you prepared and turning it into the second is called "localization" or "l10n".
It's a lot of work but you can translate anything online using this method.
