Forum .LRN Q&A: .LRN and acs-lang

Hi,

I have till recently been working extensively on implementations based on the OPenACS3.2.5 package and have completed a few projects for clients ranging from Schools/Colleges to private firms.

Now I am now working with the Education Department of the University of Delhi in developing a Knowledge-sharing web initiative to augement the courses that they run.

The challenge being faced is that the offered courses are bilingual (Hindi and English), with students using both english and/or hindi for their work. The Client requires the web-site to be bilingual in the sense, that users can post content on the site depending on their preference of Language. Which means that in lets say a discussion forum on an issue, the thread would include some messages in English and others in Hindi, depending on the original language in which the content was contributed.

From the forums here, I believe the .LRN package is now completely internationalised and has been transalated to some languages and work is on for the others.

1. I have installed the .LRN package on my testing machine and have it working. I have configured and installed The postgresql and aolserver with UNICODE encoding as detailed in the forums here. The problem being faced is that in /acs-lang section I am only offered the option to choose a time zone and not a locale. Since I am new to the OpenACS 4.x world, would someone suggest what possibly may I be missing. Is the acs-lang set by default during the .LRN installation or do you need to tweak around a bit ti integrate it with .LRN?

2. I would be interested in translating the .LRN package to Hindi. For this I have already registered at the translation server being maintained at collaboroid. I need to be given requisite rights to access relevant sections of the server.

This particular project that I am working on is a great opportunity to make OpenACS popular in this part of the world. More so because of the fact that the Government of India has been putting its weight behind Open Source Software for its own departments and institutions. AND since the higher education system in India is run primarily by the Government, the successful implementation of this project would be a major shot in arm for accepatance of the Open source implementations here in India. The University of Delhi is among the top Universities in India, and any successful implementation here would be treated as a showcase and template for future adoption of such projects in other departments and universities across India.

From the initial scanning of information on using Hindi for web-sites, I figured that the practical choice here seems to be to use UNICODE encoding for serving content and pages.
I did a brief proof of concept to serve Hindi and English content on the same page using the OPenACS architecture and UNICODE encoding and it seems to be working fine.

On the Content Part, the problemset can be organised in three parts:

1. Messages+Navigation text as offered by the .LRN package: Need to be translated to Hindi. The user would then have a choice, based on his preference to view these either in English or Hindi.

2. Content Put up by the department authorities: This would include information on courses, classes, syllabus, reading/reference material etc and would primarily deal with .LRN package. Content for this is already available both in Hindi and English. Need to figure out a way to integrate into .LRN. Again the user will be able to view the content in the Language of his/her preference.

3. Content contributed by users (faculty and students) through discussion forums, FAQ, CHAT etc. Each content item will have to be retained in its original language and hence the user will view (say) discussion threads in a bilingual format.

Priority: I need to get the acs-lang functionality working, so that I can show my client what I am talking about when I explain to them the .LRN package tomorrow. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Kirat