Localization

MidPoint localization is a community effort. Localization work is shared by the midPoint core team (Evolveum), partners, customers and a community at large. When it comes to localization, the responsibilities are divided:

This arrangement was not part of the original plan. It has naturally evolved over the years when midPoint community offered more and more translations. Finally we have figured that this makes perfect sense. Translation needs to be done by people that are native speakers of that particular language. But even more importantly, identity management is a complex field that is using all kinds of special-purpose terms and expressions. Most of that can be translated only by people that know the IDM field. Therefore even professional translators often struggle with translating midPoint to a new language. However, midPoint engineers and users naturally understand the terminology and they make perfect translators. On the other hand, Evolveum core team is best utilized in developing the midPoint code. And there is still so much to do.

MidPoint is a very comprehensive system and it perhaps goes without a saying that not everything could be localized. MidPoint primary language is English and there are some parts that will remain in English for all foreseeable future. Those are of course the source code, source code commentary and developer documentation. But there are also diagnostic information such as log files, support tools, schema documentation and so on. Those are information targeted at developers and deployment engineers. And therefore those will remain in English. We currently have no plans to localize such information.

However, there is one area that is currently a grey zone: localization of error messages. Error messages are somewhere between development, system administrator and end-user experience. Even end user will see an error message occasionally. In that case we should make an effort to make to localize at least those error messages that are part of end-user experience.

But error handling itself is a very difficult aspect to do properly and it is even more difficult to maintain. There are some mechanisms in midPoint that make localization of error messages possible. However, those mechanisms are still very limited. We would like to extend this functionality, but it needs to be done in a very sensitive way as overdoing this can ruin maintainability of midPoint code. And it makes no sense to have perfectly localized system if that system cannot be evolved and fixed efficiently. However, if you have any ideas or suggestions in this matter please contact us. However, any non-trivial effort in this direction will require some funding.

Generally speaking, midPoint is a system that reasonably localizable. However, there is always a room for improvement. We would like to improve:

Current state of midPoint localization is that it can work well in a single-language non-English environment, as it is already proven by many such deployments. However, even in that environment there may be cases when English messages appear (e.g. error messages), even though such situations should be very rare. Use of midPoint in a multi-language and multi-timezone environment is possible, but there are more problems to be expected. MidPoint does not fully support such deployment and it is expected that a subscription may be needed to fix all the issues in such cases.