Teamwork and multilinguism
There are many senses in which an application might be said to support multi-languages, or be internationalized:
Interface. Labels and messages of the web interface are available in several languages. Teamwork contains a label editor, where you can create a new language and also modify existing labels. Teamwork is used in 43 countries, almost all using it in English; actually some project managers like to have it English as teams are made from people from different countries, so it encourages communication.
But as usual Teamwork does more: it lets you change labels on the fly in the web interface, saving them on the database so that you don’t lose customizations on application update.
Data. Data inserted in the application can be inserted in any language. We have been careful about the encoding (always a problem in web applications), so that the full spectrum of UTF-8 supported languages is included, which means also Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Japanese. This also assumes that the database on which Teamwork is running supports Unicode or UTF-8 data.
Search. (This is often forgotten) Full-text search requires multi-language stemming of contents: this is from our technical contribution, which is in the context of Hibernate (an object/relational tool) and Lucene (an indexing engine):
"You need to know the language in which a document is written, in order to correctly index it; once you know the language, you can instantiate say the Snowball analyzer with the correct language stemmer. To make a practical system, you will need to guess the documents language from its content. We have found a very simple and effective solution [...].
In order to make a content findable also when searching from a language (say, German) a document in another language (say, English), we actually double indexed the content field, once with the nowball analyzer and once with the simple StopAnalyzer; so that if you are searching from German and you search Telefunken, which stemmed would be searched as Telefunk, will find also Telefunken in English documents ?"
So Teamwork’s full text search is language-aware.
Read more on Teamwork's blog.
Teamwork is available in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Polish, Russian, Slovenian and soon also in Chinese.
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