Translations Manual
Beginning with the 5.0 release, multi-language support became available in the SOS software. As SOS installations have become widespread internationally, the impact of its educational outreach has become hindered by its lack of support for non-English speaking administrators, presenters, and the viewing public. Additionally, many countries, including the United States, have large populations that have English as their second language. So to increase the reach of science education, SOS now has the ability to use non-English languages in its software.
A number of components in the SOS Product Suite, specifically the SOS Remote App (“Remote App”), SOS Public Kiosk (“Public Kiosk”), and Visual Playlist Editor (“VPLE”) all support localized user interfaces (UIs), which include dynamic translation of text in labels, buttons, and dialog boxes to a native language. The SOS Data Catalog also supports localization of dataset names and descriptions, major and sub categories, and keywords, including language variations in different countries. Data Catalog localization is supported in the Remote App, the Public Kiosk and the VPLE.
In most cases, NOAA will not be creating translations for SOS, but will rely on others such as SOS distributors, content creators, and sites where English is not the primary language to create translations in their preferred languages. NOAA will readily share high quality contributed SOS translations in different languages for the benefit of the entire SOS community.
Currently, the SOS Product Suite is most focused on simple language translations, but plan to implement additional forms of localization over time, based upon user requests.
Definitions
Permalink to Definitions- Translation
- The process of changing an source language text (in this case American English) to another language by substituting words from one language to another in context
- Localization
- A more specialized process of adapting text and other content for different countries or regions. It goes beyond translation to modify the source language and other elements to meet cultural preferences in the other language
- Locale
- The combination of a language with a country or region. SOS follows
industry standards for locale, including an ISO 639 language
code, generally two lower case letters, and an ISO 3166
country code, generally two upper case letters, with an
underscore character separating them. For example, the locale for
American English is
en_US
. Throughout this document, we refer to a locale generically as “xx_YY”, where xx = a language code and YY = a country code. While there are more complex locale standards available, these simpler ISO standards should cover all SOS locations worldwide