The greatest asset NetBeans has is its community. They are the end-users who contribute to its excellence by giving back to the product in so many ways. One community group is making a big difference by bringing NetBeans to the non-English speaking world. Developers with multilingual skills contribute translations, consult on terminology, and offer their technical expertise to deliver the IDE to China, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, Belgium, Panama, Burkina Faso... In short, they reach out to developers on nearly every continent of the globe.

What follows is a history of how the project started and where it’s going; who the pioneers were; some problems encountered and how they were solved; and how to participate or get started translating NetBeans into your language.

How did it all start?

A long way back, at the time of NetBeans version 3.4 or 3.5, a couple of motivated NetBeans aficionados realized that the tool had the potential to reach and benefit a much wider user group if it were translated into languages other than English. That’s how the TranslatedFiles (translatedfiles.netbeans.org) community project got started. It was born out of the vision of Vincent Brabant (now NetBeans Dream Team member and Java Champion) and Maxym Mykhalchuk, who produced French and Russian versions, respectively. At version 4.0, Dutch-speaking Java Champion Manfred Riem joined the effort, adding another language to the mix.

Since that time, modules of the NetBeans IDE 5.0, 5.5, or 5.5.1 have been translated into Albanian, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Azerbaijani, Czech, French, German, Spanish, Korean, Dutch, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish, Indonesian, Italian, and Japanese.

Now, with the launch of NetBeans 6.0 translations, contributors from new languages such as Bulgarian, Turkish, and Polish have recently joined the project. Figure 1 gives a hint of the various translated versions of NetBeans IDE releases.

Figure 1. NetBeans 5.0, 5.5, 5.5.1 and 6.0 in Simplified Chinese, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Albanian, Japanese, Russian, French and German

Who is carrying on the legacy?

The Software Globalization business unit at Sun joined the project around NetBeans 4.x in order to support the Japanese and Simplified Chinese versions. Translations were added for Help files, tutorials, and product and web documentation. With each new version of NetBeans, more and more community members with linguistic skills joined the project and grew the number of languages being worked on. Over time, translation contributions were being received for the various netbeans.org community pages as well as product documentation.

Thanks to the strong influence of SouJava, Brazil’s largest Java User Group, a Brazilian Portuguese team expanded this year to be the largest in membership size. This led to a pioneering collaboration between Sun translators and the Brazil community contributors. A highly-motivated and dedicated team of in-country developers, translating during their spare time, succeeded in releasing a high-quality NetBeans 5.5 in Brazilian Portuguese on the same schedule as the official Sun multilingual version. Figure 2 shows a core set of the team.


Figure 2. Some Brazil team members in attendance at Sun Tech Days São Paulo

To get a feel for the people behind the scenes, let’s take a closer look at some of the teams.

• German – Whenever Ruth Kusterer isn’t doing her day job as a member of the netbeans.org web team, she’s recruiting new members to the German localization group and helping in the translation, review, and cvs commit activities, alongside Peter, Holger, Jake and others. The half dozen or so members hail from Germany, Austria or Switzerland, and have contributed translations for the IDE as well as the UML module.

• Spanish – The Spanish-language team goes back a couple of releases, even before Argentinean Diego Gil and Spaniard David Álvarez León created the Spanish mailing list. More recently, the PanamaJUG, under the leadership of Aristides Villarreal, has been instrumental in growing the Spanish-language community throughout Latin America and Spain. A Spanish-language version has been released for NetBeans 5.5 and 5.5.1; NetBeans 6.0 Spanish is in progress.

• Polish – The Polish team is one of the newest localization groups. Magda Niedzwiecka Goldyn recently joined Sun and started immediately making contacts with universities and Java User Groups in Poland. She created a NetBeans discussion list (nbdiscuss_pl@netbeans.org) and met a number of enthusiastic Polish subscribers, like Paul, Jacek, Leszek and others, who were already organizing to start a translation effort for NetBeans 6.0. Figure 3 shows a translated NetBeans 6.0 dialog.

Figure 3. Polish translation of NetBeans 6.0 Advanced Options window)

What bodes for the future? As government entities and public universities around the world migrate to open source software, we are sure to see an increased interest in new localized versions for NetBeans. With each new release, teams expand and the number of languages grows.

Why do they contribute?

If joining and contributing to a project requires a lot of extra time outside work, studies, and home life, why do people do it? Numerous reasons can be cited. Some people enjoy the creative and challenging process of developing software; while others are interested in building a reputation and expertise in related technologies. And of course, community affiliation compels people to seek association with like-minded individuals who enjoy sharing ideas and experiences, and building communities and friendships.

When asked about their reasons for participating in these community projects, some TranslatedFiles contributors said they were strongly committed to the free and open-source software ideology. Others believe that it is only fair to give back to a community from which one has derived benefits.

Most would agree that making the tool more accessible to developers – rendering it in their native languages – is a key rationale for joining the project. For example, translating, at a minimum, the NetBeans Platform allows developers to write modules and build rich-client applications on top of a localized version of the Platform. The application is then ready to be deployed in the native language.

Henrique Meira said it best in a motivational e-mail to his Brazilian team members, when he enumerated the benefits of contributing to NetBeans 6.0 translations: “We have Sun’s management support and free access to worldwide events, technical assistance and a social community, and awards are given to collaborators – but most importantly we give back to NetBeans because of its excellence.”

What problems do they face?

Time is the single most difficult constraint that all the contributors face. It is assumed that everyone participating is a full-time developer, employee, student, or maybe professor with jobs, families and a social life. That means most of the work has to be accomplished in between commitments. As is the case in many collaborative projects, the more members one can bring to the project, the more workload that can be spread over a larger pool of people, so that no single individual feels responsible for making or breaking the project.

This leads to a second challenge: how to recruit new team members and keep them interested in the project. One or two team members usually volunteer to take on a leadership role, or are nominated by the other members. They are the ones who organize the work, create instructions and make sure all of the tasks are assigned. And they come to understand the importance of their role in keeping a team connected, encouraged and interested in contributing something for which there is no tangible reward.

How to ensure an acceptable level of product quality is a third challenge, especially when there is more than a handful of team members or a high turnover of contributors. Writing style and terminology usage need to be consistently maintained across all components and modules of the product. One way to achieve this is by using translation editing tools, such as OmegaT (see the box “Maximizing translation reuse”), and sharing the translation memory output among all team members.

Additionally, Sun shares any existing style guides and term databases with the community. The contributors need to be in constant dialogue, so they use mailing lists in their language or the NetBeans collaboration module to discuss discrepancies and doubts. Team activities, progress, and decisions are documented on team wiki pages. And those with more linguistic and technical expertise take on the role of reviewing the translations of other less-experienced contributors, or provide linguistic consulting.

How to participate

If you are inspired to get involved in localizing the NetBeans IDE, the TranslatedFiles project home page explains how to get started. The first step is to subscribe to the project mailing list, introduce yourself to the other contributors, and check if a team for your language already exists. (Before you are granted commit rights to the workspace, you will need to sign and submit a Contributor Agreement.)

If translations are available from a previous version, instructions outline how to migrate these from one version to the next, so that an open-source translation editor can be used to leverage and preserve the reusable translation memory. The Sun engineers prepare the localization kits, which consist of the localizable elements – .properties, .xml and .html files. Once the translations are completed, reviewed by others on the team and committed to the cvs, it is time to test and verify the localized strings. The Sun Build Engineering team will eventually make weekly development builds available on the netbeans.org site for review and testing purposes. It’s also possible to build a local version of the localized IDE when official builds are not yet available (see the box “How to build a localized NetBeans 6.0”).

There are other ways to contribute translations, especially for those who have a particular interest in website content or product documentation. The netbeans.org community page for localization (netbeans.org/community/contribute/localise.html) lists a variety of opportunities for submitting translations. The most visible pages to contributors are the community page translations (netbeans.org/community/contribute/localisation-status.html). Contributors are continually sought to help keep the twenty-eight languages in sync with the regular updates of the English release.

Additionally, the community docs project (wiki.netbeans.org/wiki/view/CommunityDocs) offers the possibility to contribute content in English or other languages. Community members have submitted translations of tutorials and other NetBeans products and release documentation. They have also created original flash demos, white papers, and articles in various languages.

Three NetBeans portals exist currently in languages other than English: ja.netbeans.org, zh-cn.netbeans.org and fr.netbeans.org. You can contribute original or translated content to these sites to spread knowledge about NetBeans to developers in countries or communities where these languages are spoken.

All of these projects are ways to contribute to NetBeans as the IDE of choice worldwide. It is a way to share your skills and expertise with others, and help reach developers who might not be aware of the great features offered by NetBeans. The benefits of contributing to the TranslatedFiles translation project are numerous. You can make the IDE more accessible to international developers, and, in the process, enjoy the camaraderie of sharing knowledge, experiences, and social interaction with other people who love NetBeans and believe in the
open source ideology.