Brian Harry’s announced this a while ago on his blog (here) and now the time is there to give you the first pointers to where we are in the Team System Web Access Translation effort. The last few weeks I have been working with MS Folks on this project. This project is trying to provide additional translations of the Visual studio Team System Web Access web site that is provided by Microsoft to enable access to TFS from an internet location.

I think it was about 3 months ago, that I ran into a customer who did not want to use TSWA because it was not available in the Dutch Language. I knew Microsoft did not have the resources to make this translation, so I asked them if it would be possible to create a community effort around translating the site into other languages then Microsoft provides out of the box. While I thought it would be a long shot, I was very happily surprised with the reaction to my mail. Brian Harry responded to me with the following mail:

“Thanks for the request Marcel.  After discussing this internally for a bit, we have decided to enable community translations of TSWA.  If you’d like, you are welcome to be our guinea pig, um, I mean Beta tester J“

 Hakan Eskici (lead for TSWA) created for this effort what we call the Translation Toolkit. This toolkit contains a VS solution with all the appropriate resource files in it that we need to start creating our own translated versions. He will also create some video’s on how you can create a localized version based on the toolkit. This will all be posted on the codeplex site once we have the goods available J

They asked me if I would like to manage the community effort and I agreed. So from now on you can contact me if you would like to start a localized version for your native language that is not provided by MS. We have created a Codeplex project to host the sources and the work items, you can find it over here: http://www.codeplex.com/TSWAL

Before you start writing me mails to contribute, I want to note that currently we are in the first phase of the project where we test drive the toolkit and are experimenting in the deployment models (batch files, installers, etc). We have now started with the Dutch and Turkish language and I have some fellow VSTS MVP’s who are going to take care of at least the Portuguese an Norwegian versions to get us started.

I must say it quite a lot of work to make a translation. There are > 2000 entries in the resource files that need to be translated an I must say it can be quite hard to come up with an appropriate translation of e.g. the word: Work Item or Change Set, etc.

If you would like to contribute after we have finished the first phase, please send me an email using the email option on this site to contact me. State in the subject [TSWAL] and the language you are willing to work on. Eg. nl-nl (that is e.g dutch). I will keep a list of people who volunteered and I will contact them as soon as we have the finished the first languages and have a clear model in terms of how we can involve you. (send resource files via mail, add you to codeplex as contributor, etc, etc.)

Hope you all like the effort and I hope a lot of people volunteer.

Cheers,

Marcel

p.s. for the Dutch people who read my blog, what do you think translates best for Work Item? Until now I came up with "werkpakket". I also got sugestions like "actiepunt" or "werkopdracht". What do you think translates best to the dutch language?