[#VWR-1593] Improve localisation ability of Second Life

1. Second Life Viewer - VWR

Improve localisation ability of Second Life

Created: 07/Jul/07 03:53 PM Updated: 05/Nov/09 10:55 AM

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Component/s:

Internationalization, User Interface

Affects Version/s:

1.17.0.x, 1.20, 1.18.3 Release Candidate, 1.18.0, 1.18.1.2, 1.18.2.0, 1.21, 1.22 Release Candidate

Fix Version/s:

None

File Attachments:

slviewer-0-v11905-CommonDateAndTimeFormats.patch.bz2 (6 kB)
2.

slviewer-0-v12160-CommonDateAndTimeFormats.patch.bz2 (5 kB)
3.

slviewer-0-v12160-CommonDateAndTimeFormats_v2.patch.bz2 (5 kB)
4.

slviewer-0-v12240-CommonDateAndTimeFormats.patch.bz2 (5 kB)
5.

slviewer-0-v12270-CommonDateAndTimeFormats.patch.bz2 (5 kB)

Issue Links:

Relates

This issue Relates to:

VWR-721 Dates are not displayed in the local date format

This issue is related to by:

~~VWR-7415~~ (partial) German Translation is poor

~~VWR-12370~~ Date in group switched from Month/date/year to year/month/date

VWR-6787 The word "none" on a group list appears as the English word "none" and it is unable to translate it through XUI files

VWR-1719 Need for a better mechanism to add new UI translation

Last Triaged:	03/Sep/09 08:46 AM
Linden Lab Issue ID:	DEV-1987
Patch attached:	Patch attached

Description

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I have been trying to produce an English (British) translation of the client, and am running into issues affected by the lack of full localisation support.
Things such as
measurements (calculations output meters, not metres),
dates (not being able to control mmm/dd/yyyy -> dd/mm/yyyy),
clothing names ('Pants' not being defined in the locale files, but in avatar_lad.xml which doesnt seem to be localisable),
numbers (no ability to control "1000" or "1,000").

All

Comments

Change History

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Alissa Sabre added a comment - 13/Jul/07 08:58 AM

It's true that the current SL viewer has very few facilities other than simple message text switching. I do agree with you that we need some improved mechanisms. However, this issue seems to be better filed as a feature request instead of a bug.

Also, I have some comments on what we need. For example, the current SL viewer uses metric system for measurements always. I see no reason we must support English system, IMHO. Remember, everything we measure is in-world objects.

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Gudmund Shepherd added a comment - 15/Jul/07 07:09 AM

I'm unsure how it's a feature request, because the feature exists, it's buggy. I'll let a bug manager decide that.
I also do not wish to further complicate things with Imperial units (which, btw, Britain no longer prefers), but I'm not asking for that: I do expect SL to be able to allow metre(standard)/meter/metro/mitir etc to be used.

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Alissa Sabre added a comment - 28/Jul/07 08:29 PM

Discussed on Internationalization Triage, 2007-07-27. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Bug_triage/2007-07-27/Transcript#VWR-1593:_Improve_localisation_ability_of_Second_Life

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Ramzi Linden added a comment - 05/May/08 12:34 PM

I am adding the equivalent Internal ID for this issue. As Gudmund and others have noted, there are a number of places where the SL viewer (and server responses to it) are not fully internationalized. These include date formats, decimal formats, folder/object names especially in inventory and Appearance, and many simulator-generated or website-generated responses.

This is a large project to remedy. It is on the radar of the current (short-term) Viewer Roadmap (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Viewer_Roadmap) but not immediately scheduled for implementation. However we hope to revisit that in the coming months; it is clearly a major piece of improving the usability of Second Life.

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Henri Beauchamp added a comment - 05/Jan/09 06:21 AM

Here are three patches (one for v1.19.0.5, one for v1.21.6.0 and another for v1.22.4RC) that are a first (but big) step towards date and time full internationalization, and that also cure many oddities in the way date and time formats are used in the viewer (such as having a 12 hours clock in the status bar but a 24 hours clock in time stamps, or not specifying the PDT/PST timezone where appropriate (events, for example), leading to confusion between local time and SLT...).

They implement four new settings holding strftime() formats:

ShortDateFormat: examples: "%Y-%m-%d" for ISO and Asian formats, "%m/%d/%Y" for US format or "d/%m/%Y" for the rest of the world...
LongDateFormat: examples: "%A %d %B %Y" for everyone but US, and "%A, %B %d %Y" for US.
TimeFormat: examples: "%H:%M" for 24 hours clock and "%I:%M %p" for 12 hours clock
TimestampFormat: example "%a %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S", "%a %b %d %Y %I:%M %p", etc...

There is one exception to the use of non hard-coded formats, and it is in the events search tab: the day and month in the results list and between the previous/next day selection buttons are hard-coded as %m-%d (i.e. an ISO format without the year). This is mainly because there is no room for the year there. It is still better than month/day (without even leading 0s) which are ambiguous and can even make you think about a page number for the item between the day selection buttons.

Note that this patch would need a couple of proper configuration entries to be added to the Preferences floater: I did it for the Cool SL Viewer (http://sldev.free.fr/) in its CoolPreferences patch but I don't have time to add an equivalent code for un-Cool viewers... ;-P
The way the Cool SL Viewer does it is to provide two combos in the Preferences, one for 24hours and 12hours clock, and another for YYYY-MM-DD, DD/MM/YYYY and MM/DD/YYYY short dates format, then deducing the other formats (LongDateFormat and TimestampFormat) from the user's choice.
By the way, it would be perhaps about time to add an internationalization tab to the Preferences floater, moving to it the i18n stuff from the over-crowded General tab, and adding the hours and short date formats selection combos such as those I use for the Cool SL Viewer.

Note also that the patch does not address the build date and time in the About floater as these are hard coded at compile time (via the _DATE_ and _TIME_ macros).

What still needs to be done:

The patch does not translate the date stamps in the Land & L$ tab of the groups floater (too much work to be worth it, unless some change is done in the way dates are stored server-side).
The patch does not translate the day of the week and the month to the user's selected locale.
I think that hard-coding the grid time as PDT/PST is not good, as there are now other grids than SL, and these are not always hosting their servers on the West US coast... Plus, what would happen should LL move to the East coast ? It would be nicer if the grid local time info could be withdrawn from the grid itself and display it in a handier way in the status bar (for example as UTC-7 instead of PDT: this makes calculations easier for everyone when setting rendez-vous, events, etc...).

You can of course see the patch in action in the latest releases of the Cool SL Viewer (http://sldev.free.fr/).

Enjoy and Happy New Year !

PS: I do think it is important to let the choice for the user to choose a different time and date format than the one of the chosen locale. For example, someone might want to use an ISO date format and a 12 hours clock with an US/English locale (any Canadian around ? ).

[ Show » ]

Henri Beauchamp added a comment - 05/Jan/09 06:21 AM Here are three patches (one for v1.19.0.5, one for v1.21.6.0 and another for v1.22.4RC) that are a first (but big) step towards date and time full internationalization, and that also cure many oddities in the way date and time formats are used in the viewer (such as having a 12 hours clock in the status bar but a 24 hours clock in time stamps, or not specifying the PDT/PST timezone where appropriate (events, for example), leading to confusion between local time and SLT...). They implement four new settings holding strftime() formats:

ShortDateFormat: examples: "%Y-%m-%d" for ISO and Asian formats, "%m/%d/%Y" for US format or "d/%m/%Y" for the rest of the world...
LongDateFormat: examples: "%A %d %B %Y" for everyone but US, and "%A, %B %d %Y" for US.
TimeFormat: examples: "%H:%M" for 24 hours clock and "%I:%M %p" for 12 hours clock
TimestampFormat: example "%a %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S", "%a %b %d %Y %I:%M %p", etc...

The patch also builds a "short time stamp" format where appropriate (when there is not enough room for a full time stamp in the lists, for example), by concatenating the ShortDateFormat and the TimeFormat. There is one exception to the use of non hard-coded formats, and it is in the events search tab: the day and month in the results list and between the previous/next day selection buttons are hard-coded as %m-%d (i.e. an ISO format without the year). This is mainly because there is no room for the year there. It is still better than month/day (without even leading 0s) which are ambiguous and can even make you think about a page number for the item between the day selection buttons. Note that this patch would need a couple of proper configuration entries to be added to the Preferences floater: I did it for the Cool SL Viewer (http://sldev.free.fr/) in its CoolPreferences patch but I don't have time to add an equivalent code for un-Cool viewers... ;-P The way the Cool SL Viewer does it is to provide two combos in the Preferences, one for 24hours and 12hours clock, and another for YYYY-MM-DD, DD/MM/YYYY and MM/DD/YYYY short dates format, then deducing the other formats (LongDateFormat and TimestampFormat) from the user's choice. By the way, it would be perhaps about time to add an internationalization tab to the Preferences floater, moving to it the i18n stuff from the over-crowded General tab, and adding the hours and short date formats selection combos such as those I use for the Cool SL Viewer. Note also that the patch does not address the build date and time in the About floater as these are hard coded at compile time (via the _DATE_ and _TIME_ macros). What still needs to be done:

The patch does not translate the date stamps in the Land & L$ tab of the groups floater (too much work to be worth it, unless some change is done in the way dates are stored server-side).
The patch does not translate the day of the week and the month to the user's selected locale.
I think that hard-coding the grid time as PDT/PST is not good, as there are now other grids than SL, and these are not always hosting their servers on the West US coast... Plus, what would happen should LL move to the East coast ? It would be nicer if the grid local time info could be withdrawn from the grid itself and display it in a handier way in the status bar (for example as UTC-7 instead of PDT: this makes calculations easier for everyone when setting rendez-vous, events, etc...).

You can of course see the patch in action in the latest releases of the Cool SL Viewer (http://sldev.free.fr/). Enjoy and Happy New Year ! PS: I do think it is important to let the choice for the user to choose a different time and date format than the one of the chosen locale. For example, someone might want to use an ISO date format and a 12 hours clock with an US/English locale (any Canadian around ?

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Henri Beauchamp added a comment - 02/Feb/09 11:14 AM

There was a small bug in the patch for v1.21.6 and v1.22.4 (date displayed as 1 Jan 1970 when displaying a group notice you are the originator of).

I just added a v2 patch for v1.21.6 and a new patch for v1.22.7.

The good patches are therefore:

slviewer-0-v11905-CommonDateAndTimeFormats.patch.bz2
slviewer-0-v12160-CommonDateAndTimeFormats_v2.patch.bz2
slviewer-0-v12270-CommonDateAndTimeFormats.patch.bz2

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Rob Linden added a comment - 05/Nov/09 10:55 AM

The problems identified here (but not the specific patch) will be in the next version of the viewer