Friday, May 27

I started on my translations yesterday. With a lot of help from Matt and Jeff, I got this done.
I didn't really get to translating the sidebars, that seemed like it would take a lot of time, and I continued translating the other parts while Matt worked on figuring that out.

Later we saw that translating the whole document would take a lot of time, and I wouldn't be able to complete it during my Senior Experience. So, we decided to get the .PO file translated and send it to Sphinx.

Matt got that ready today, and I translated most of it today. There were a lot of technical words that when translated into Nepali would be more confusing for the users to understand. Abhishek Singh, our point of contact in OLE Nepal, said it would be no point in us translating if people found it more difficult to understand what was being said. So, I translated the ones that I thought were common words that Nepali people would be able to understand and other technical words, like JavaScript, I either transliterated them or left them in English.

I emailed the .PO file and the list of transliterated words to Abhishek, Jeff and Matt. We'll send the file to Sphinx as soon as we  make the necessary changes after weget feedback from OLE Nepal.

Some technical stuff

Bazaar - is a revision control system that allows you to make revisions and lets you keep track of the changes you make to a project. So, if you decide that the revisions you made today weren't good and you want to revert to the one you had yesterday, bzr lets you do that.

Also, if there are multiple people working on the same project, each person can create their own branch to make changes, and later all the different revisions can be merged.

This is really useful for projects whose contents keep changing and projects that have a lot of people working on them. Changes can continually be made, and if they don't turn out as expected, there is already  a back up of all the other revisions that were made earlier. 

Launchpad - is a web application that allows users to develop and maintain software. It also allows for translations in various languages. The source code hosting for launchpad is done using the Bazaar version control system.

Sphinx - is a tool that allows for easy documentation. Most python projects use Sphinx for their documentation as it has great output formats, hierarchical structure, code handling, extensions and automatic indices that make documentation easy.

Hi! I started my Senior Experience yesterday. For the next 3-4 weeks I will be collaborating  with School Tool and OLE Nepal. I will be working in the Arlington Career Center under the supervision of Mr. Jeff Elkner.

Introduction

School Tool is a student information system which is used all over the world. It allows you to enter various information about the student like demographics, attendance and grades. It is now becoming widely used, and is  translated/ being translated into several languages.
One of those being- Nepali. School Tool has not yet been fully translated into Nepali.

OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) is a global project that aims to provide every child a low-cost and a low-power laptop, which they will use for educational purposes.

Ole Nepal, (Open Learning Exchange Nepal) is a non-profit organisation that has been working on improving the standards of learning in all Nepali public schools. They are trying to integrate technology into Nepali education.

How do they tie in? 

Ole Nepal has been trying to use School Tool as their student information system at their deployment sites in Nepal. The major task now is to make sure the information is easily understood by the Nepali community- most of whom are non- English speakers.

That's the big picture- improving the quality of education and increasing the access to educational resources by using technology- the laptops

Challenge- making sure that everybody, most of whom who have had no experience with technology and do not speak English, can make use of these technologies.