Natural language support objects

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section has multiple issues. Please help improve the article or discuss these issues on the talk page. It does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve it by citing reliable sources. Tagged since September 2008. Very few or no other articles link to it. Please help introduce links to this page from other articles related to it. Tagged since February 2009. It may require general cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Tagged since September 2008. Sections should be added to this article, to conform with Wikipedia's Manual of Style. Tagged since September 2008. It contains predictions, speculative material or accounts of events that might not occur. Please help improve this article or section by removing speculative content. Tagged since September 2008.

This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. WikiProject Computing or the Computing Portal may be able to help recruit one. (September 2008)

NLSO, or Natural Language Support Objects, is a software library being developed as an open-source project. Its purpose is to provide a tool for easily translating web sites and applications into multiple languages.

Natural Language Support Objects were created by Ivan Peter Gan. The class library attempts to manage language-dependent resource strings through database tables (one for each language). This allows for systematic selection of the language-appropriate terminology.

[edit] Projects

The NLSO projects are divided into three distinct areas:

1. NLSO-WEB ^[1], which deals with web-site specifics using PHP/MySQL;
2. NLSO-ADDRESS ^[2], designed to enhance the NLSO family by providing address information both in English and the native language, and
3. NLSO_OBJECTS ^[3] — the most difficult to attain, as commercial compilers are supplied in compiled form and can not be modified by end users.

Therefore, the project has now turned to the opensource project Lazarus, which uses the Free Pascal Compiler.

NLSO-ADDRESS ^[4] is currently being constructed with the Lazarus development system, it uses UTF-8 encoding to allow the display of address data in multiple scripts

The system is designed to exchange non personal address data with a central server so that address data can be shared globally. This will lead to the ability to print address data in English and Hebrew for letters bound to Israel or English and Chinese for letters bound for China.

[edit] Goals

The goals of these projects are:

1. to reduce translation workload;
2. to enable end users to translate applications into their native or preferred language;
3. to share translation information among web servers and applications, in order to collectively reduce replication of translation effort, and
4. to provide accurately localized address information, in order to improve mail delivery.

Considerations of the cultural impact of any changes to the website or application are left to the developer, being beyond the scope of NLSO.

[edit] References