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How to customize wordings in certain Kaltura pages

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Language Customizations in Kaltura KMS/KAF

[Public Version]

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Background

At the University of Minnesota, there is a main Kaltura instance that connects to Kaltura MediaSpace (KMS), and also integrates with the Canvas and Moodle LMSes through what’s called the Kaltura Application Framework (KAF). For both KMS and KAF, the user and admin interfaces are very similar.

The KMS/KAF admin interfaces have allowed us to make minor language customizations, which we have used to help address some issues.

Language Customizations

For a listing of our current language customizations, see Kaltura in LMS/MediaSpace - UMN Language Customizations [Public]. This lists language changes in both KAF and KMS, on a per-line basis.

Upstream Changes

When Kaltura does code deployments, that may include new language files to accommodate new features and changes, etc. Thus far, when those files are deployed, we have not seen our customizations break, though it is a good idea to check your customizations when new KMS/KAF versions are released.

Process

Log in to the appropriate KMS or KAF admin page.
Go to the Languages module and click Download texts.
On your desktop, open the .zip file and then open the English folder therein.
From the English folder, open default.po in a text editor.
Find the text you wish to edit. The text should appear on two lines in the file. Edit the second of the two lines and then save the file.
1. Example: as of March 18, 2019, for the KMS upload page, lines 9885 and 9887 show "All common video, audio and image formats in all resolutions are accepted." We changed this to HTML that includes an acceptable use policy, and notes about closed captioning. This is raw HTML now, but we’re looking into using an iframe to point at a KMS/KAF staticpage instead.
Go to http://po2mo.net/ and upload the edited file. Download the .mo file.
In the KAF/KMS Languages module, click + Add "UploadCustomLanguage. A new section will appear on the page.
For languageAdminName enter a name, e.g. "en-us 20190318 test 1".
For languageClientName enter English-US.
For languageCode enter en_US.
For localeFile, upload the .mo file you downloaded from po2mo.net.
For localeIcon, upload an image. The page suggests getting an image from this library; note that the United States flag looks a lot like the flag for Liberia.
On the Languages page, click Save.
Go to the Application module; under language, you should be able to pick the languageAdminName you defined above.
On the Application page, click Save.

Verification

To see your customizations appear in the given KMS/KAF instance, you might need to:

Clear your browser cache
In the KMS/KAF admin area, click Clear the Cache
Wait a little while :-)

It isn't a bad idea to review your change in a narrow browsing window and/or smart phone to see how they behave for different platforms.

Notes/Limitations

Some KMS/KAF modules have their own language packs, for example the Editor module.
Sometimes text blocks will go across lines in the language pack, for example in the CaptureSpace splash screen. There seems to be less of this in more recent releases.
Some language strings allow HTML, and some do not. This takes some testing to find out.
You can only edit language strings where those strings exist. Some pages could really use a blank string placeholder. If they exist, I don’t know how to find them!

There are areas where one might expect to be able to edit the text, but you cannot. For example, this tooltip on the Change Media Owner page does not appear in the English language file: