Posts Tagged ‘mlanguage’

Testing mLanguage

Monday, 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

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