There has been a lot of good discussion lately about the problem of internationalizing Ubiquity’s command-line interface. Because the CLI has notions about natural-language grammar embedded in it, localizing the interface to another language is not just a matter of substituting strings. It will require more effort, but also potentially offers more reward.

A lot of the discussion has been taking place on personal weblogs, which makes it a bit hard to follow what’s been going on. To counteract that, here’s a round-up of important articles that have been written so far.

Describing the general problem:

• The Tower of Babel, by Jono
• Localizing Ubiquity: an Open Letter to Linguists, by Mitcho

Language-specific articles:

• Thinking Ubiquity in Portugese, by Felipe
• Focus on Japanese, by Mitcho
• Thinking Ubiquity in Italian, by Flod

Proposals for partial solutions:

• Writing Commands with Semantic Roles, by Mitcho
• Overlord Verbs: a Proposal, by Jono
• Verb-final languages: An advantage? by Jono

There is also now a mailing list, ubiquity-i18n@googlegroups.com, for discussing internationalization of Ubiquity. We are eager for your feedback, especially if you’re a localizer in the Mozilla community.

— Jono, on behalf of Ubiquity development team