Notes from an Operative

The Auto Internationalization (I18N) Library for Opera 11 Extension Developers is a new experimental drop-in library for Opera 11 extension developers to quickly and conveniently include multi-language support within their extensions without having to include all of those translations manually.

Having to write translations manually takes a lot of time, skill and patience and while this library may not provide perfect translation, it is suitable as a zero-cost, low-maintenance method to localize any extension.

You can view the source, download, pack and play with a sample extension containing this library at the following URL:

https://github.com/richtr/Opera-11-Extensions--Auto-I18N-Library

It works by creating an API at opera.extensions.i18n for developers to quickly and easily obtain pre-defined messages that have been auto-translated in to a user's locale.

A developer simply need write a single message.js file, in the language of their choice, and the library takes care of translating these messages on demand, caching the translated results and serving those results to any Background, Popup and/or InjectedJS processes.

This project needs some more love, and is in the early development stage, but it should suffice for demonstration purposes.

If you have any questions, comments or feedback just leave them in the comments below.

With the launch of Opera 11 Beta today, we're on our way to having a solid extensions framework on which we can build in the future.

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