Back in January 2006, I wrote a blog post on the Krugle site titled WikiTrans – translation by the community.
Since then, I haven’t been able to spend any time even thinking about this topic, but two more recent sightings popped it back up in my mind.
First there was the October event at IMUG (International Mac Users Group), titled Collaborative Website Translation via the Worldwide Lexicon, by Brian McConnell. The short description is:
The Worldwide Lexicon Project is an open source, collaborative translation system for websites and publishers. The current version of WWL, available now for Word Press, Firefox and PHP based sites, enables a website’s readers, as well as volunteer or staff translators, to create, edit and share translations to and from almost any human language.
While this focuses on website translation, while I’m more interested in application translation, the goals are similar – how to create an open, collaborative system for translating (web sites, applications) from English into other languages.
And ideally doing it in a way where the results can automatically be used by the owner(s) of the original version to create/publish localized versions without much extra effort. As otherwise it just won’t happen.
Second, I noticed on the Chandler mailing list that there’s a big push for localization of the current version. And that, in turn, led to discussion about how to manage these translations. I wish I had the cycles to help out here, as it would be a fascinating project to create this type of system that could just plug into the Chandler development process.
Ken's Techno Tidbits 
Hello.
I am the leader of the Worldwide Lexicon project. We are in fact coming out with some localization tools for web applications. This package, SLS (simple localization system), consists of a handful of PHP macros that automate the process of rendering a webpage in multiple languages, and also enables users to do in situ translation. It is not designed for desktop applications, but should work nicely for localizing all sorts of websites and applications.
The WWL project itself is more concerned with document translation, which has its own set of issues and challenges. However. we need to localize our own tools, and so we plan to share the tools we built to do this with anyone else who can use them.
Brian McConnell
Hi Brian,
Thanks for the update, sounds cool – I’ll have to check it out!
— Ken
Ken,
I thought you’d like to know that SLS is now available as a PHP library. Just visit http://www.worldwidelexicon.org for a live demo and download instructions.
To try the demo, pick a language from the drop list in the upper right corner of the page (try Polish), then click on the pencil icon and see what happens. It makes localizing a site UI or content a WYSIWYG operation.
Have fun,
Brian