DLTT and unicode languages

Translations are an important part of the Dokeos offer. The interface is translated, to date, in more than 34 languages. Of course, these translations vary in quality and completeness, but we are trying to provide you the best tools to help us get them better. That's why, around 2 years ago, we have created the DLTT (Dokeos Language Translation Tool). First created by Patrick Cool, it now has more than 1400 translators registered, who frequently translate a bit of the english (or any other) language variables into their own language. To register to the DLTT, you need to ask for a login and be approved by one of our team members (obviously, we are trying to avoid any spammers/hackers by checking the requests manually). You can do this by going to the DLTT homepage and clicking the "Create an account here" link just below the login box. You will then be asked for some details and, more importantly, the languages you want to translate from and to. Once you're done with that, your registration will need to be approved and you will receive an e-mail once this has been done. If you want to start translating now, you should preferably start with a "_unicode" suffix language, as these will use the utf-8 character set, which is better for international tools like Dokeos. If there is not _unicode type language in the list for the language you want to translate, you can either choose to join the translators of the existing language, or ask for the new language to be created, by sending us an e-mail (our contact e-mail address is at the bottom of the page). Please make sure you mention [DLTT] in the subject of your e-mail. Recently, I have been improving the language packages generation process, and made it go from an initial generation time of about 2 minutes to an acceptable 15 seconds. This feature allows us developers to import the new translations into Dokeos. Although we don't have a fully featured double-translation option, where you can translate something in one language and it gets automatically translated in the unicode version, we will be working on that in the future. As for now, Dokeos works in UTF-8 (you have to change the character set option in the administration panel) but you will have to modify a few things by yourself (add the unicode languages to the languages table in the main database and activate them in the administration panel), but it isn't an officially supported option just yet. If you try that, you shouldn't mix UTF-8 character set languages with non-UTF-8 character sets (like offer your portal in chinese_unicode *and* italian ISO-8859-15) as this will break either one or the other language.