Translating your site

[dfidler]

Hi Everyone,

I was wondering how you multi-language sites translate your boards.

I've started a site that I want to translate into 3 other languages (french, german, spanish) using people from the community as translators. However, I have the following problems:

1. I don't know the translators very well and so I don't want to give them unfettered access to the phrases for fear of them screwing up
2. Because of #1, I'd like to implement an approval queue for the text
3. Not all phrases will make sense out of context so I'm wondering if there is a way to give translators the context that they need to do a proper translation.

Now, I know that there are language packs available, but I have a lot of phrases that are not 'stock' vb phrases (I've coded a fair bit of custom functionality already).

Does anyone know if there's something out there that can help me solve the above problems? If not, I'm going to write my own and would probably release it to the community (if anyone would even find it at all useful).

Cheers,
Dave.

[dfidler]

no one?

[Lynne]

How about just sending them a list of the phrase contents you need translated and then they can send the translation back to you?

[dfidler]

Originally Posted by Lynne

How about just sending them a list of the phrase contents you need translated and then they can send the translation back to you?

That's a possible solution but that would require the cut/paste of all of the phrases from vB into something like excel (or whatever) and then copy/pasted the same data back in. It also lacks the approval queue that I'd like to use. While I can read a bit of German and most of French, my Spanish isn't all that great (though I can probably get by).

The idea is that I want to have two translators (or more) for each language and have each phrase go through approval before it's visible on the site.

Cheers,
Dave.

[Lynne]

Your original idea is going to require a lot of modification on your part. There is just nothing in place like what you want. That is why I'm suggesting other alternatives. You could open up a forum only for the Translators and have one thread per phrase and then have users post their translations and if they disagree, then it will be in that single thread.

If you do decide to go about doing your modification, you may be able to write a single page, only available to the translators, and use a new table that you set up to hold all the translation proposals. Then when you settle on one, you make a single click which enters it into the phrase table and then it's no longer available for the users to submit translations for. It would take some work, but it is doable.

[dfidler]

Originally Posted by Lynne

If you do decide to go about doing your modification....

Your suggestion is very much along the lines of where I was going with this, yeah. But I don't see it as being all that much work tbh. A few screens, three tables and a bunch of testing.

And thank you for the alternate suggestions.

Cheers,
Dave.