5. Adaptation of ILIAS' Language Implementation, Creating the Hungarian Language User Interface

ILIAS has been translated into 21 languages until now. The Hungarian adaptation is maintained by GDF. Our task is to elaborate the Hungarian user interface and documentation and keeping in touch with the development team of the University of Cologne.

Translation of 5584 pieces of texts and sentences. Some of the technical expressions simply does not exist in Hungarian, e.g. Repository ("Taneszköz tároló"). Menu system needed to be tested and tailored to GDF processes. See  illustration below:

Creating the Hungarian language file

There are several differences between the English and Hungarian terms and we have to use the wide-spread terms. And if it is possible we want to use Hungarian words and terms everywhere.

Sometimes we had to think for long to find the most proper terms, because in the Hungarian language these words do not exist. E.g. one of the most important word was "Repository" in English which means "Magazine" in German. The Repository is a main area in ILIAS. Users can find everything which help studying - the tools for studying as we say –. Such tools are: learning modules, courses, files, exercises, tests, forums, chats, groups, surveys - maybe in folders. We don’t think it would be right to translate "Repository" to "Tananyagok" (that means "Syllabuses") or "Segédletek" (that means "Studies") but our term is unusual when you first see it.

Now there are 5584 records in the Hungarian language file (ilias_hu.lang) because we only complete it sometimes correct the strings or sentences but we don't erase any of it. The reason is: if a new version comes out, some old functions are removed from ILIAS - but we or anybody can use older versions with a new lang file. And we can be sure every ID is used only for one aim - it is the experience.

You can choose a few file formats to prepare lang files. We use .xls for translating, than comes a simple converting. The only thing we must observe, that language files are encoded in UTF-8 which allows cross coding content like English interface and Chinese content. Each line contains one language snippet and has the structure: module_name#:#identifier#:#value as you see below.

Structure of entries in the language files

The language files are in separated files in 3 version. Every language belong to 2 files: one for common users pages and one for installation. You can load every day the last file-versions, because the Language Manager running on the developer server re-generates files daily. New and modified entries are marked with 3 double crosses, so only these need to be translated.

The language implementation of the 3 version uses a two-level concept with language files for each language in the "lang" repository and the loaded languages in the database. Screenshot of refreshing language files in database:

Refreshing language files in database

In our project the translation is  prepared before we use the new functions or our test and the translating is parallel. As the ILIAS concept is well based and its philosophy is good for a college, we rarely make mistakes.

We send the refreshed-expanded file to Cologne before issuing the new version of ILIAS, so when we receive the new version it already contains the new language file.

Summary: One of the most important things in a software-system is to provide comfortable and suitable layout for users. One part of the layout is the text. Texts must be impressive and easy to understand. They must be Hungarian every time. This is our intention.