Internationalization (i18n) of course content?

[Mattijs Joosten]

The current design, as I understand it, is to have a multi-language platform with single-language course content.

What if someone wants to create a course in all official EU-languages?

Creating and maintaining 20+ courses with the "same" content in different languages is a problem. It also makes a mess of the course catalog.

Can edX staff chime in, please, and say if there are plans for course content i18n on the roadmap?

If not, would it be something they would like to add to the roadmap, considering this real-world pan-European usecase?

(Or are there current features that I've overlooked?)

Solutions could range from maybe being able to mark a course as a different-language version of another one to full i18n of course content within a single course.

If there are no plans and won't be any in the near future, I'd like to get to work on i18n of course content myself.

In that case, what would be a good place to start, you think? Some kind of i18n XBlock, or a code contribution to the platform leveraging the existing language selection code?

Some considerations are: where to put the .po and .mo files, how to get the platform to use them, and how to provide translations for videos, transcripts and pictures.

Thank you staff and community for your time and responses.

[Braden MacDonald]

Hi Mattijs,

I'm not edX staff, but I am familiar with this issue. You're not the only one who wants multi-lingual courses, and it's definitely something that the Open edX community would use heavily and benefit from. However, as you've discovered, it's not possible in the platform today (except for videos, where you can upload multiple subtitle files for different languages).

At the moment, I'm not aware of any commitments to build support for multi-lingual courses. However, we are currently working on a new way of storing course content for the Open edX platform, called Blockstore. And as part of that Blockstore work, we are thinking about multi-lingual course content. So although nobody is working on multi-lingual content at the moment, we are trying to build a new foundation for it in the platform, so that someone else can come along later and finish the work necessary to get multi-lingual content fully implemented. I just gave a talk about Blockstore last week at Open edX 2019 which explains some of this, including a brief discussion of multi-lingual course content; the video of that talk will be posted in the next few weeks.

However, Blockstore is a long-term project and it sounds like you may wish to start building something sooner. If so, you'll have your work cut out for you! But I'd be happy to provide a bit of guidance if you're willing to take this on, as I'm sure would others at edX or in the community. I think a good place to start would be to think (and ask) about the workflow: would course authoring/translation teams generally prefer to be doing translations within Studio (where they can preview/test the content as they work), or using some external tool like Transifex? I think that that product question will then help to inform the technical decisions of how translation should be implemented (whether to use gettext files or XBlock field overrides or some other technique).

Regards,

Braden

CTO, OpenCraft

[Mattijs Joosten]

Thank you for this explanation. Much appreciated. I will discuss it and keep you posted.

Op vrijdag 5 april 2019 01:11:00 UTC+2 schreef Braden MacDonald: