
Open Source Globalization
Analyst firm Gartner (news, site) has indicated that globalization is one of the top five trends that will the impact enterprise software market this year as organizations expand the client base outside of the United States. Organizations using Liferay and faced with the challenge of supporting a global audience now have a little more help from Liferay and its open source community.
Liferay portal is becoming even more open and accessible with it latest effort to translate the software to more than 40 languages. The company has integrated its portal with Pootle, a Python-based open source online translation management tool, which will allow Liferay's community volunteers to localize the portal's content.

translate.liferay.com
The software translation fully embraces the spirit of open source. Any registered user of Liferay's site can log into translate.liferay.com, integrate with Pootle and provide translations for the software. Using Pootle, users can:
- Suggest translations
- Check the progress in the translation effort for a specified language and the entire project
- Reviewuntranslated items
- Review suggestions
- Approve or reject suggested translations
- Check translation quality using tests performed by Pootle
- Work in parallel for a given language/project pair
The process is fairly simple. Once a users log into the translation site they are granted contributor permissions which allows them to see status and make translation suggestions. Next, users specify the project and language(s) they will contribute. Then users can select items for translation. To spur the competitive spirit, the translation interface shows top contributors. Additional details on using the Liferay translation interface provided by Pootle can visit the Liferay wiki.
Learning Opportunities

suggest translation
Managed Translations
For anyone thinking of getting cute and providing a cleverly ridiculous translation -- you are out of luck. All translations are reviewed by Liferay's team of translation leaders comprised of company staff and active community members.
The translation project is the latest in a line of multiple activities Liferay has undertaken to expand its worldwide presence.The company has expanded to over 100 channel partners globally from Latin America to the Czech Republic. In addition, Liferay has created a network of approved user groups in multiple countries around the world.
Liferay is embracing globalization. Is your organization? We'd love to hear your thoughts.