3D Slicer in My Language: Internationalization and Usability Improvements

3D Slicer is an open source and multi-platform software package for the analysis and 3D visualization of biomedical imaging data. The platform has a worldwide community with 550 Slicer downloads per day, 10,500 posts on the Slicer Discourse Forum in the past year, 12,800 citations of 3D Slicer in Google Scholar, and over 1 million downloads since Slicer’s inception. There have been 26,883 commits from 170 developers since the development of 3D Slicer version 4 began in 2006. 3D Slicer fosters the creation of biomedical research teams and its shared scientific methodology brings them together into a global community. However, the software is currently available in the English language only. While English is the language of science, clinical practitioners in non-English speaking countries work and communicate with their scientific colleagues in their language. Coupled with an admittedly complex user interface, the language barrier slows down the adoption of 3D Slicer by local clinician-scientist populations. 3D Slicer community members have contributed Slicer tutorials in Spanish and German, and worked to translate the interface to Chinese. However, these individual efforts were missing an internationalization infrastructure, and therefore a more comprehensive effort is needed. This proposal aims to improve the adoption and usability of 3D Slicer by implementing an internationalization infrastructure and performing related software maintenance.