August 24th, 2009
Few days ago: Checking out mLanguage WordPress plugin.
Few days ago we started doing some experiments on translating 99translations. Somebody suggested that on UserVoice feedback forum few months ago and it totally makes sense for us – why would we require all users to know English – may be somebody knows only Spanish and Chinese or German and Polish, these users will most likely turn away and leave our site.
So we played with few Wordpress plugins to implement static pages translation as step one, there are some smart ideas out there , I liked the most mLanguage plugin that uses alternative divs
to bundle all translations on the same page – that slightly ( multiply amount of languages ) increased the page size but provides INSTANT translation to another language as you click the language icon. And when I say instant I really mean INSTANT.
Excitement ended as we started translating home page – the problem is the page actually has some HTML / CSS hacks / techniques to work around browser problems. So as we added
in a
block everything collapsed – not fun. The solution was to enlarge translation blocks to avoid breaking CSS. That worked for few more minutes and became very painful experience since the blocks of HTML had to be copied and reassembled by mLanguage plugin. Maintaining that technique would cost us fortune.Stopped.
Our next stop is Google Translate (only it since Microsoft alternative is still in development). Much better experience than mLanguage. It allowed us inline editing (not with out issues) and crappy automatic translations, which can be considered handy when your goal is just an experiment.
Generally speaking Google Translate isn’t bad … might be good option for may be blog translation when amount of pages to be translated in short time is huge (world wide) and the quality isn’t so crucial.
Our philosophy in translations the quality is crucial – generally speaking a website translated to say Chinese with 80% coverage and 10% ridiculous errors in translations looks stupid in China. So we want to achieve 100% coverage and have no machine translation errors for our site.
Conclusion
We are going to develop new function of 99translations that will replicate many Google Translate functions but will be able to control translation quality and establish translation workflow suitable for translation serious web sites.
- I believe we are going to improve user experience compared to Google Translate
- provide excellent support (as we hope we provide for 99transations right now) where Google doesn’t have any support
- web site management (2-200) pages
- language selection widget templates for your site
- achieve acceptable performance for translated web sites using Amazon Cloud services
Stay in touch!
Simon Rimmons
Tags: i18n, mlanguage, wordpress
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August 18th, 2009
About a year ago we started using Comatose CMS plugin for 99translations content management. Few days ago all content was migrated to Wordpress.
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Tags: 99translations, cms, comatose, hosting, i18n, rails, wordpress
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April 28th, 2009
Prologue
Few weeks ago we’ve decided to make our translator directory a little bit cooler. Google Chart API was the tool for the job. Reading few posts about it before we’ve realized that they have really cool ability to create map-based charts. Generated charts look pretty and they can also be useful.
Tags: chart, google api, i18n, maps
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December 24th, 2008
Coding Java today I figured one really small and neat feature to make Java easier. Don’t really know how to call it – may be “if-instanceof”.
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Tags: java, java7, language, oop, programming
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December 1st, 2008
- Translation context rules
- Importing Java and GetText comments
- Preserving translation order
- Github configuration improvement
- VCS import wizard (allows to create 99trans project by just pointing to your VCS URL – we will do scan to find translation files and detect types)
- Suggestions
- AJAX spell checker
- Locale selector (people don’t get en_US notation so we will allow them to choose country and language)
Tags: 99translations, ajax, features, gettext, github, i18n, java, news, spellcheck
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September 4th, 2008
We have updated our Rails integration plugin to allow combining translations from different sources into one file readable by rails from RAILS_HOME/config/locales.
The plugin adds another task to your rake tool rake trans:update_all. The plugin is updated in the public Git repository at GitHub http://github.com/99translastions/ruby-tools/tree/master. So please check it out and play with it.
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Tags: 99translations, i18n, plugin, rails
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August 9th, 2008
We are actively developing integration tools based on advises from rails-i18n group. We got about 80% of the code done. Completion and testing may take another week.
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Tags: 99translations, integration, java, plugin, rails
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