Localizing an application
-
Not a programming question. Our company got a deal with a major paper manufacturer. Unfortunately, this company has two mills in Canada and due to the influence of Canadian labor unions we need to supply a French version of our software to the two mills. Luckily, the application was designed for localization so all that needs to be done is to translate the English resources to French. What are the different options? How has your company tackled this issue? Ideally I will like to hand over the resource files (VC++ .rc) to someone and expect them to give me back the translated resource files. I remember someone (Jon Sagara?) posting about a translation service which he was very happy about, but I can not find the link.
http://www.worldlingo.com/en/products_services/worldlingo_translator.html[^] I'v used this sight a time or two Pablo www.aes4you.com
-
OK, this is maybe kind of a programming question but I'm really curious how people tackle internationalization/localization since I can't see how simply bunging all your strings in an RC file works. In English, the structure of a sentence changes if it is talking about countable objects e.g. "There is 1 banana" vs. "There are five bananas" so you can't just have an RC string of "There are %1 bananas." And I believe this kind of problem is worse in other languages. I came up with a custom solution for Awasu to handle this kind of thing but it makes using standard tools for the translation work a bit tricky.
0 bottles of beer on the wall, 0 bottles of beer, you take 1 down, pass it around, 4294967295 bottles of beer on the wall. Awasu 2.2.2 [^]: A free RSS/Atom feed reader with support for Code Project.
Actually, I use this approach: "There are one or more bananas (%1) here." "%1" is the actual number of bananas. This type of wording has worked well for translations to German, French, and Japanese. On a few occasions a translator has asked me to provide a slightly different English text (or add messages to handle the 'countable' issue), but it's fairly unusual. Using parentheses or other punctuation to isolate the parameter in the text seems to help as well.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
OK, this is maybe kind of a programming question but I'm really curious how people tackle internationalization/localization since I can't see how simply bunging all your strings in an RC file works. In English, the structure of a sentence changes if it is talking about countable objects e.g. "There is 1 banana" vs. "There are five bananas" so you can't just have an RC string of "There are %1 bananas." And I believe this kind of problem is worse in other languages. I came up with a custom solution for Awasu to handle this kind of thing but it makes using standard tools for the translation work a bit tricky.
0 bottles of beer on the wall, 0 bottles of beer, you take 1 down, pass it around, 4294967295 bottles of beer on the wall. Awasu 2.2.2 [^]: A free RSS/Atom feed reader with support for Code Project.
BTW: I don't know why people are giving you 1's. You brought up a personal experience with the topic under discussion, and indicated you had some questions about it. I think your questions are pertinent to the subject at hand, so you get a 5 from me.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Not a programming question. Our company got a deal with a major paper manufacturer. Unfortunately, this company has two mills in Canada and due to the influence of Canadian labor unions we need to supply a French version of our software to the two mills. Luckily, the application was designed for localization so all that needs to be done is to translate the English resources to French. What are the different options? How has your company tackled this issue? Ideally I will like to hand over the resource files (VC++ .rc) to someone and expect them to give me back the translated resource files. I remember someone (Jon Sagara?) posting about a translation service which he was very happy about, but I can not find the link.
Being a hobbyist developer and not a company, it's not easy for me to do localisation in my apps as I can't pay someone to do it. About the best I can hope for is to use free web translators, but I dread to think what they might actually produce! :omg:
-
Not a programming question. Our company got a deal with a major paper manufacturer. Unfortunately, this company has two mills in Canada and due to the influence of Canadian labor unions we need to supply a French version of our software to the two mills. Luckily, the application was designed for localization so all that needs to be done is to translate the English resources to French. What are the different options? How has your company tackled this issue? Ideally I will like to hand over the resource files (VC++ .rc) to someone and expect them to give me back the translated resource files. I remember someone (Jon Sagara?) posting about a translation service which he was very happy about, but I can not find the link.
-
We've gone down several different paths when it comes to translating our software. We've contracted to translators, used an internal employee and had one of our forein reps do it once. The worst experience was one contracted translator... they clearly weren't used to doing software. They were doing a translation to German for an embedded device with a pretty small screen, so just about everything was abbreviated. Every string we gave them had a length limit on it. Well, some of their translations just wouldn't fit, so they reduced the font size on the printout they gave us to make it fit. :doh:
I have found that most translators do just that: translate. Many do not have the specific technical ability necessary to perform a proper, get into the real ideas behind the language, change necessary to effect a "real" translation and are therefore little better than automated translator programs. This is one of the major reasons for the lengthening of translated text. My second language is German - the text of which which everyone "knows" is always longer than English. Wrong! Translating the sense, rather than the words, ends up with about the same length text (many times it's MUCH shorter, sometimes it's longer). This is for real-rime process control applications. Your mileage might vary. The key is to think about the possibility that your application may have to be localized (or "localised" if you're English) as part of the design phase. You will then have fewer problems at the localization phase.
-
Not a programming question. Our company got a deal with a major paper manufacturer. Unfortunately, this company has two mills in Canada and due to the influence of Canadian labor unions we need to supply a French version of our software to the two mills. Luckily, the application was designed for localization so all that needs to be done is to translate the English resources to French. What are the different options? How has your company tackled this issue? Ideally I will like to hand over the resource files (VC++ .rc) to someone and expect them to give me back the translated resource files. I remember someone (Jon Sagara?) posting about a translation service which he was very happy about, but I can not find the link.
In the article: SpokenWord - Text-To-Speech and Office Automation in 1! http://www.codeproject.com/vb/net/SpokenWord\_1\_0.asp GWSyZyGy has a cool trick of using BabelFish WebServices for Translation, eg: Select Case parts(0) Case "Borland" Dim borland As New com.borland.ww6.IBorlandBabelservice borland.Timeout = 1000 tmp = borland.BabelFish(Trim(parts(1)), tmp) Case "AspxRunway" Dim aspxrunway As New com.aspxpressway.www.piglatin aspxrunway.Timeout = 1000 tmp = aspxrunway.toPigLatin(tmp) Case "BabelFish" Dim babelfish As New net.xmethods.www.BabelFishService babelfish.Timeout = 2000 ' translation services are kinda slow ShowStatus("... translating to French") tmp = babelfish.BabelFish("en_fr", tmp) ShowStatus("... translating to German") tmp = babelfish.BabelFish("fr_de", tmp) ShowStatus("... translating to English") tmp = babelfish.BabelFish("de_en", tmp) Case "WebserviceX" Dim webx As New net.webservicex.www.TranslationService Dim lang As net.webservicex.www.Language webx.Timeout = 2000 ' translation services are kinda slow ShowStatus("... translating to French") tmp = webx.Translate(lang.EnglishTOFrench, tmp) ShowStatus("... translating to German") tmp = webx.Translate(lang.FrenchTOGerman, tmp) ShowStatus("... translating to English") tmp = webx.Translate(lang.GermanTOEnglish, tmp) End Select HTH!