Translating a Website.

deise go deo

I am probably in the wrong place for this.:o



I just wanted to know how much work would be involved in Translating a website from One language into another.

As I understand it the translation its self is the easy part, its writing the code to allow the translation as a choice that is the work, so I was just wondering how much work it would be for a large website(Boards for example) to put that code in place for it to be translated into other languages.

An example of what I mean would be Facebook. It can be translated into about 30 languages.

amen

It depends if you are using .Net you could use resource strings and every where you display text/message you you call the resource with a label and the language you are interested in. So if the Text is welcome and your wanted English/Spanish you would have an en.resource file and a es.resouce file.

The en would have WelcomeText = Welcome
The es would have WelcomeText = Hola.

Problems can arise though if the translated text is longer than the original text or if there are images with text.

Also increases testing as you need to test in multiple languages.

translation its self is the easy part

not always true. A literal translation might work but a native speaker might be better.

deise go deo

amen wrote: »

It depends if you are using .Net you could use resource strings and every where you display text/message you you call the resource with a label and the language you are interested in. So if the Text is welcome and your wanted English/Spanish you would have an en.resource file and a es.resouce file.

The en would have WelcomeText = Welcome
The es would have WelcomeText = Hola.

Problems can arise though if the translated text is longer than the original text or if there are images with text.

Also increases testing as you need to test in multiple languages.

Ok, I understand that it would vary depending on the website its self, but for a large site like Boards(assuming they wanted to) would it be feasible to translate the site or would it just be too awkward/take up too much time?

not always true. A literal translation might work but a native speaker might be better.

In general, but the language I am interested in is Irish, as most of the translations would be single word translations for tab's etc then you can use Focal.ie which is basically designed for providing accurate terminology translation.

daymobrew

If you have a WordPress install then the qTranslate plugin makes it all quite easy, even providing a little Language Switcher widget.

Could you convert your site to WordPress? (Disclaimer: I'm a big fan of WP so I have tunnel vision for it).

conor.hogan.2

There was discussion of doing this to boards with irish - http://wiki.boards.ie/wiki/Vbulletin_Irish_translation_project

I dont know what came of it.

amen

but for a large site like Boards(assuming they wanted to) would it be feasible to translate the site or would it just be too awkward/take up too much time?

well (and this is bad answer)...it depends.

If the bulletin software that boards uses supports resources/multi languages then it should just be a matter of getting the resource file and adding Irish.

On other hand if it didnt and you have access to the source you might be able to add support for Irish,

If you didn't have access to the source you may be able to add some sort of proxy between the internet and the bulletin software and translate the page before it is sent to the browser (not easy though)

but43r

It really depends on the website itself and the framework that it uses. For example boards.ie uses Vbulletin which I'm pretty sure offers translating the site in different languages. For a custom built website that had no requirement of being multilingual when it was built it could be much trickier.
Btw boards.ie wouldn't be that hard to translate. There is very little static content that would need to be translated. The user contributed content like threads and posts couldn't even be translated automatically as the translation wouldn't be accurate.
Anyway, what is it that you need to translate - Static site, forum, blog?

Kavrocks

It all depends on how the website it made.

If it is made with static html files then you could just copy the whole website into a gaeilge folder and translate it.

If you are using user login you could set a cookie to determine which language to display.

deise go deo

Thanks for the responces,

The reason I asked was that I wanted to raise the issue of Translating Boards into Irish on Help Desk, but I wanted to find out if it would be a feasible prospect first.

It seems that it is:)


I do actually want to translate a website into Irish my self, but it is much smaller.

http://gaeilgeul.weebly.com/

I set up the website, but I have no clue as to how you would go about translating it or having a Bilingual choice.

I built it as a part of Weebly so I dont know anything about designing a website or code or anything like that.

Can a website like this be translated, and what would I have to do?