[asterisk-users] New Languages: Call for contributions

[John Todd]

(also posted today on http://blogs.digium.com/2009/09/02/new- 
languages/ )

Asterisk is being used all over the world, in dozens or even hundreds  
of nations, in a huge variety of linguistic settings.

Until now, the official Asterisk distribution has come in only three  
language “flavors” – English, French, and Spanish.  We are long  
overdue for getting more languages into the “main” Asterisk  
distribution, and over the past few weeks there has been quite a bit  
of work done getting licensing and practical concepts understood to  
the point where we are comfortable with expanding the number of  
available languages at the discretion of the community.

There has been a document submitted for inclusion with Asterisk which  
outlines the protocol process, practical requirements, and license  
criteria for having a new language submitted to Asterisk as part of  
the official distribution.  It should come as no surprise that we’re  
asking for all contributions to be in the Creative Commons v3.0 Share- 
Alike/Attribution licensing regime, as this is clearly the best (or  
only) method for distributing works such as audio recordings with an  
open-source package such as Asterisk.  We’re also insisting that the  
talent that creates any language files be available for others to  
hire, so that there does not become a bottleneck with new prompts for  
others who wish to expand the range of recordings.  Lastly among the  
important notes is that in the rare instances where we have new  
prompts as part of the “core” package requirements, anyone who has  
submitted a language package is under a non-binding community  
commitment to get the new prompts created in their language for  
addition.  (This is a rare event, so hopefully is not overly  
burdensome to contributors.)  This is truly a community participation  
request – there are far too many languages in the world for this to  
work without being almost entirely contributed by active Asterisk  
users and developers.

The complexities of adding new languages is significant – there are  
intricacies in the “say.c” sections of code which determine how  
numbers and dates are pronounced.  There are differences in the way  
voicemail prompts are created for playback.  New languages may not be  
functionally complete if they require code to handle certain nuances  
of sentence structure, and the inclusion of new language audio files  
does not mean that they will be sensible in that particular language  
even if accepted.  However, the first step is to get the language  
recordings in there, and then others can come in and correct the code  
once they have half the puzzle in their hands – that’s the spirit of  
open-source!

There are at least 35 language or dialect versions already existing in  
third-party repositories (http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+multi-language 
) and of those there are probably a quarter that have more than one  
voicing in male or female talent formats.  I’d love to see the  
majority of those find their way into Asterisk as selectable language  
options.  If you know the person that has created one of these  
language sets, please forward them the new language guideline link  
below!  I’ll be trying to contact all of the language contributors,  
but often there are linguistic barriers or dead-ends for contact data.

To read the requirements and to get started on your language  
contribution to Asterisk, see this document which will soon be part of  
the Asterisk standard distribution: Asterisk Language Submisson  
Criteria, part of issue #15771.

JT

References:

https://issues.asterisk.org/file_download.php?file_id=23667&type=bug

https://issues.asterisk.org/view.php?id=15771

---
John Todd                       email:jtodd at digium.com
Digium, Inc. | Asterisk Open Source Community Director
445 Jan Davis Drive NW -  Huntsville AL 35806  -   USA
direct: +1-256-428-6083         http://www.digium.com/