Zimlet translation & adaptation

[Klug]

Hello all.

As you might know, the Zimlets provided with Zimbra are english speaking (english date) and designed for the USA (US phone numbers or addresses).

Obviously, we need them (and want them) in other languages (such as French).

I've had a quick look at the date Zimlet and found out it was not designed at all with the idea of being translated.

Add to this that I think important (read: mandatory) to have the date Zimlet to be able to recognise a date in french and english (plus other languages when they get translated). I don't want to have a french Zimlet to simple replace an english one.

So I'd like to know (this is a question for the Zimbra guys and girls) what would be the best way to handle this issue. The question is about the load in the WebUI, the usability of the Zimlet, the cleanest coding methods, etc...

Should we take the existing Zimlet and add into this single zimlet the other languages (then deploy a single Zimlet) ?

Should we create a brand new Zimlet per language (based on the english one) and deploy a Zimlet per language ?

Any other suggestion ?

In any case, how should we handle the "right click" in the UI ?
Can the language of the contextual menu change like the language for rest of the UI changes ?

From my point of view, I'd rather use the second solution (one Zimlet per language) as it seems easier to maintain. But I'd rather have a pro advice on that (and clues about the context menu) 8)


Nice week-end to all,
David.

PS : I used the date Zimlet as an example in this post, but the same question goes for the phone Zimlet or other ones.

[inigoml]

Hi Klug.

I've also think about zimlets translations. In my opinion, Zimlet languages and/or country specific issued shoud be tied to WebUI language.

I think is better having a zimlet with a country specs (language, date format, etc) instead several zimlets. Maintenance would be easiest specially in international companies (having six zimlets for same function is not specially easy to mantain in my opinion). I would use same model used today with WebUI internationalization. For example, one zimlet with several "zimlet_COUNTRY.properties". If a country code fails, it would revert to a default country properties that could be english, of course.

Originally Posted by Klug

Should we take the existing Zimlet and add into this single zimlet the other languages (then deploy a single Zimlet) ?

Should we create a brand new Zimlet per language (based on the english one) and deploy a Zimlet per language ?

Any other suggestion ?

In any case, how should we handle the "right click" in the UI ?
Can the language of the contextual menu change like the language for rest of the UI changes ?

[Klug]

Why not, but...

Lets take my example : I want a French WebUI but I want the "date Zimlet" to be able to "see" French and English dates, because I receive mails in French and English.

And maybe a couple other languages...

[cvidal]

Hi:

I created a French date Zimlet that works very well together with the English one. Search this forum or go to http://files.whitehatmail.fr/ and login with "invite/invite". There you will find a Zimbra directory and a file zcs-fr-4.0.3_GA_406.tgz that installs the French translation, the French spelling and the French date zimlet.

From the architecture point of view, I think the best is to have separate zimlets and play with zimlets priorities to make they work properly.

In the case of the date zimlet, the FR zimlet has priority over the EN zimlet, so if a date is like 05/08/06 it will recognize it as Aug 5th (FR) and not May 8th (EN) (the priority is managed by the installation script I wrote).

You can also have different zimlets in differents COS, what gives you even more flexibility (you can have a DE+EN COS, plus a FR+EN COS for instance).

Carlos

[inigoml]

Originally Posted by Klug

Why not, but...
Lets take my example : I want a French WebUI but I want the "date Zimlet" to be able to "see" French and English dates, because I receive mails in French and English.

Ok, I understand your point of view, but in general, people expect to receive emails (95% or more) in his own language. If you need to add a control for selecting not only WebUI language but also "Date display" and others, you will have an usability problem. This control "for changing dates display" should be easy to use, and not confusing for end user. So it should be located at reading pane. But imagine what would be for a user selecting both "language preference" and "date display preference"...

You should remember we are talking about END user, this is a very very different profile user that you and me. Everything should be easy, no complicated selections. And autoselecting display preference by encoding is not possible since all western language share same encoding (ISO-8859-1/15 or UTF-8) and it's difficult to select proper language without analyzing body text...

[deepblue]

Hi,

although this thread is quite old I want to pick it up again. I just finished writing a german date zimlet: http://www.efm.de/zimlets/com_zimbra_date_de.zip

While modifying the original version of the date zimlet to recognize german date formats, I also stumbled upon the question on how to handle english or french date formats received in mail in english or french language.

My first Idea was to bind the localized version of the zimlet in some way to the language setting of the Users UI (which is available since ZCS 5.0).

But this approach misses the point: The language setting of the User has nothing to do with the langage and the date formats in a mail.

So I think it would be a much better approach to have one date zimlet which automagically detects the langauge a mail is written in, and adjusts its behaviour to this language.

How could this be done? I know that spamassassin can try to detect the language and add a X-language header (google for Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::TextCat). But as Zimbra uses Amavis, SA is not able to directly write X-headers. And I dont know if Amavis could do that.

However, if one could obtain the information of the "source language" of a mail, it would be possible to write ONE date zimlet matching all possible date formats....

Regards
Thomas