The Gordian Knot

Representing the best spirit of cooperation and peer assistance that CODI is frequently known for, Julio Campa, Miami Dade Public Library System, presented a session on Tuesday on making your own version of HIP in Spanish. We welcome Julio to CODI, and thank him not only for his presentation, but his offer of assistance to any library configuring their ipac, HIP, or C/HIP Portal’s Spanish interface. The Spanish interface currently comes with 3.x or higher. However, manhy of us realized that any local customization or items not on the default profile do not translate unless we edit the strings and provide the translations ourselves. Some libraries are blessed with native speakers in their libraries, but many of us do not. The only thing worse than not having a Spanish profile is having a Spanish profile configured by a systems administrator who thinks she knows Spanish but her college French resurfaces! (I resemble this remark!)

To this end, Julio is a blessing to all of us, and has provided not only step by step instructions, on how to do the setup and modification of the strings, profiles, and variables, but he continues to offer his direct translation of various library catalog phrases for the upcoming releases. While Julio is a valuable employee to Miami Dade with a day job that keeps him quite busy, we thank him (and his director) for this gracious offer in the spirit of cooperation and giving.

It looks like while the HIP 4.1 and higher releases will come with a full Spanish version, any customizations will again need to be re-translated by hand for local tags, buttons, and strings when the library has chosen to modify the default. Therefore, Julio is guaranteed job security in his unofficial post of “translator laureate” to the user group for many years to come. Thanks, Julio, for a great presentation, and your willingness to lend a hand to all of us!