OpenBMC Globalization

[Ryan Arnell]

 Hi,
Happy new year everyone! Last month in our community call, IBM Design Team
discussed about globalization for OpenBMC. The slide deck can be found
here-

We tested our existing app against about the following 9 baseline
languages-

1. German
2. French
3.Italian
4. Spanish
5. Brazilian
 6. Portuguese
 7.Japanese
 8.Simplified Chinese
 9. Traditional Chinese

Overall our web app tested pretty well for adopting different length of the
words and line orientation for different languages. However there are few
places we found some issues that is addressed below.

*Recoding to prevent layout breakage*
We have enough space in the UI for longer texts. But there are few areas
that broke and need to be recoded to support better warping of text
elements. These are

Header notification and timezone area
Navigation
Server control- Server power operations
Server health- Event log

Tables in the current design breaks pretty easily with different length of
data. This is present in the following pages-

Server health- Hardware status
Server health- Sensors

Detailed examples with screenshots can be found in the slides.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/15xG-v0jY7VKTFE-KRBFtmnxyjrUHa6IT/view?usp=sharing

*Restructuring sentences*
There are few terms in our build that creates improper translation. For
example in our Server Information page (Homepage) we have -

Turn <on/off> server LED

Based on the current status of the LED,  the ‘On’ or ‘Off’ term displays.
Since these terms sits in the middle of the sentence, it breaks the
sentence in two phrases- ‘turn’ and 'server LED’. This creates incorrect
translation. We recommend re-writing the phrase to  Turn server LED
<on/off> which doesn’t not break the sentence.

*Using a translation service *
This is probably the biggest issue we have with our app. Right now all the
terms and messages that need to be translated are embedded into our html
files. This creates serious issues translating the app properly.

We propose using a service like g11n-pipeline
<https://www.npmjs.com/package/g11n-pipeline>. This way we will only have a
single ts file to translate. Also, this way we will have more robust
translation as we will have control over translated phrases. We can also
test our layout properly against all the proposed languages.

Thanks
Ryan
User Experience Engineer
IBM
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