Language technologies to make the Internet a truly global experience

Localizer

Localizer is a tool that provides facilities to build multilingual websites. It is based on the Zope web application server, which is an extensible environment: that is, developers can provide modules that add new features and services to Zope. These modules are called products. Localizer is one of these products. There are many Zope products related to internationalisation, and Localizer has become the most popular — the reference among them for anyone who needs to build a Zope based website in several languages.

We at CodeSyntax are using Localizer to create bilingual sites combining strikingly different locales (Basque and Spanish) in content-rich websites. For instance, the Basque Translator Association«s site Eizie.org or a local council's official site, Elgeta.org.

These sites show that the main challenge for developers is one of organisation. When entering a term via the search dialog box, should the user get results listed for all the locales or just for the locale he or she is currently using when clicking the button? Localizer provides a framework powerful and flexible enough so that different organisational models can be implemented. For instance, websites with multiple-locale organisations are possible (a two-locale website, with a specific section with four locales).

The future for this tool looks promising. Future versions of Localizer will include features currently available in translation memory systems. Splitting text into simpler sentences for translation, the use of external databases that use fuzzy matching to provide suggestions to the translators, the interconnection with automatic translation systems, the support of standards such as XLIFF or TMX, workflow, creating multiple versions and a lot more will soon be within the scope of future releases.

Our goal is to keep pushing to position Localizer as an industrial strength tool to build multilingual websites, to manage multilingual content and to become a standard reference in the free software community and in the globalisation market.

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