NEW YORK, May 13, 2009 – The acclaimed 18-minute talks available free on the TED website will now be accessible beyond the English-speaking world, through the TED Open Translation Project (www.ted.com/translation), which launches today, generously sponsored by Nokia.

A year in the making, the project offers video subtitles, time-coded transcripts and the ability for volunteers worldwide to translate any talk into any language. The project launches with 300 translations in 40 languages; more than 200 volunteer translators have already contributed.

Download the Open Translation Project press release as a PDF >>

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Illustration by Markus Koljonen

Most people, including technology professionals, don’t know the meaning of the terms internationalisation and localisation. How many people know what a localisation specialist does? How many organisations localise their products?

According to LISA (the Localization Industry Standards Association), “localization is the process of modifying products or services to account for differences in distinct markets” while “internationalization is the process of enabling a product at technical level for localization”. In other words, internationalisation involves the creation of a design that makes it easy to adapt a product for different regions or ethnicities (called locales), while localization is the adaptation itself. Internationalisation is done once per product, localisation is done for each locale of the product.

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You might think I’ve gone crazy. Posting about not coding in Spanish in Codespanish.com!

I actually promote the translation of your software to Spanish and other languages. When I say that you shouldn’t code in Spanish I mean don’t use Spanish or any other language than English in your variable names, file names, function names, etc. Programming languages, scripting languages, OS commands, etc., are all based on the English language. So, why would you do any different with your code?

Take for example this PHP code from the post “Building a forum in PHP and Mysql”.

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