Speak

Goals

• Replace GlotPress: Think of this plugin as a GlotPress 2.0, in the form of a plugin.
• Create an easy to use interface: Speak is intended to be easy to use for everyone, without worrying about any of the underlying translation specifics.
• Provide a simple, thorough API: Speak's API is intended to be easy to use both internally, and externally (for things like the upcoming language packs)
• Reuse wherever possible: WordPress already includes the POMO library to handle a lot of translation tasks. GlotPress is an established project with a lot of history. Speak strives to reuse GlotPress' code where sensible, and rewrite the rest.
• Embeddable: Already have your project data in Wizbang type posts? Speak should be able to reuse your existing post types and simply attach translations to them, rather than reinventing the system.

Design

All data in Speak is implemented based on one of three types:

• Strings: The basic unit of translation is the String post type. Any data that can be translated is represented as a String. Strings can have a parent String, which is called the "base" or "original" string.

• Projects: The Project post type is used to group Strings that relate to a common source. Projects have child Strings, and can have parent Projects.

• Languages: The Language taxonomy is used to group Strings translated into a certain language together. Strings associated with a Language are automatically copied (using copy-on-write) from the parent to speed up translation of dialects. Languages without a parents inherit Strings from the "default" Language, and the default Language contains the canonical source String values.

There also exist some common views:

• Translation Sets: A Translation Set is all Strings with a specific Language related to a specific Project. A Translation Set by its nature is a possibly sparse set, as not all Strings for a project may have been translated. If a String has not been translated, the Translation Set will show the parent Language's translation.

  (That is, for a project "Example" and language "Foobar": all Strings with their parent Project set to Example, and belonging to the language term "Foobar")

Contributing

There's a lot of work to be done, and Speak is only in the design stage at the moment. If you want to contribute, please contact me directly rather than contributing patches.