OWASP Internationalization

News
7th April 2008: The OWASP Internationalization project starts Juan Carlos Calderon starts the effort as part of the SoC 2008.

Why this project?
The main goal of OWASP is to spread the word about security (“Our mission is to make application security "visible," so that people and organizations can make informed decisions about application security risks.”) and OWASP has done great work so far. The number of native and secondary speakers in the world for Chinese, Spanish, French, Russian, Arabic and Indi languages are estimated in similar number to English speaking or even more (Some References at Ethnologue, Encarta, Wikipedia). It is a good time for OWASP to reach those that do not speak English to have full access to all the OWASP materials, not just a couple of documents.

Objectives
This project is the pioneer of an effort to define basic guidelines for the localization of OWASP site and OWASP projects (both documentation and software). Also define a way to do a continuous effort to keep information across the different languages in synchrony. The main objective is to provide a framework for new translation efforts, those effort will have 2 main objectives:
 * 1) Make OWASP information currently available, reach the people speaking of an specific language
 * 2) Allow non-English speaking people to contribute to OWASP and have internationalization projects transfer that knowledge to English and other languages. So as you can imagine the replication effect will have great benefits to the OWASP community and the world of application security.

FAQ
1 Q. Should I create a Translation project for any translation in ? A. No. If you plan only to translate a single document, you can simply go an do it. We appreciate if you can let us know about the translation being in progress.

2 Q. What are the steps to create a new translation project? A. First, Check that the project was not started by someone else, if created join them. in not then you can start a new OWASP project and name it OWASP- following the How to start an OWASP project page. However we recommend you to wait for the guidelines we at OWASP Internationalization project are working on, so it is easier for you organize the project.

3 Q. Should I create one translation project per document/software translation? A. Absolutely no. The objectives proposed for a translation project are long term, this because involves a good amount of effort to make it useful for people speaking . So if you want to only translate one or two documents, we strongly recommend you to question 1 and 2.

Road map
Objective Status  (Expected) Competition Date  Notes 1. Team up with Larry Casey to implement Multi language support in OWASP.org Mediawiki. In Progress June 20, 2008  First Contact with Larry Casey Done. We will test in a test instance and send required settings for portal to him. 2. General Guidelines on minimum/recommended requirements to start a new language translation for OWASP Document and Site Pages. In Progress May 2nd, 2008  First Draft Created April 11, 2008 3. General Guidelines on minimum/recommended requirements to implement internationalization and localization (i18n) on OWASP Software. Not Started TBD  None 4. Create a Communication strategy to help and keep track on new pages or changes in significant pages so all the translations are in sync. Not Started TBD  None

Active Translation Projects

 * Spanish