Open Atrium: Solving the Translation Puzzle

We launched translate.openatrium.com earlier this week to support translating Open Atrium into more than a dozen languages. It currently ships out of the box in English, Spanish, and Arabic, but we want to grow this. To do this we built a localization server that provides downloadable, up-to-date translations that are automatically repackaged every few hours and that allows people to post their own translations and fixes to the server while they’re doing them on their own sites.

The tools that make this possible have been in the works for some time now. The localization client allows for on page translations of UI strings, and the localization server lets you keep a centralized translations repository for all modules, versions, and languages. We’ve had the tools for awhile, however, in order to realize just how hard it is to actually do and maintain translations in Drupal, you need to try it.

In the case of Open Atrium, we’re not talking about a Drupal module or a single site. Open Atrium is a full featured Drupal intranet distribution that uses Drupal core, some contributed modules, and some custom specific ones, and all of this this is deployed to many sites. This is one of those times when it feels like you have all the pieces to do what you want to do, but it’s still hard to figure out how to make everything work together in a human friendly way to get the job done.

So for Open Atrium, we want to:

• Provide a downloadable package for a simple installation in any of the supported languages.
• Set up some channel to allow people to easily contribute and improve translations.
• Keep everything up-to-date with our release schedule and the quickly moving codebase.
• Allow Open Atrium users to easily keep their translations up to date with the latest version.