Presentation: Beyond PO: How to make Django work for right-to-left languages

Description

Localising a project for some countries is as simple as translating a .po file, but if you’re asked to develop a website for Middle Eastern countries, you’re facing a language with a completely different alphabet, and you can be sure that unpredicted encoding issues will emerge! In this talk we’ll show you how we make multilingual sites work, and the tips and tricks we’ve picked up along the way.

Abstract

Language detection

How to address URL based translation and Django language detection easily.

RTL Language Direction

Most of them are speaking in a language which is written right to left so it’s not enough to just translate your app to their language. You should change the style of your app to display them in a correct format. Some graphic elements should be flipped horizontally to make sense for them.

Character encoding issues

When you are working with a language with completely different form of alphabet and characters there is a huge chance that you face an issue if you don’t abide some encoding standards.

Calendar System

Some of those countries have their own calendar which is completely different from gregorian calendar which is used in most of west countries. There are some apps helping you to convert unix timestamp to those different calendar format in both backend and frontend side

Interface design and proper fonts

As their language is RTL some graphic elements need to be mirrored. Although it is true for most of layout parts but there are still some sections that needs to keep their direction, like mathematical equations, multimedia players progress bar, … Using modern frontend tools like SASS mixin to automatically float elements depending on the language direction.

Beyond PO: How to make Django work for right-to-left languages