website: multilingual support

[mattiejas]

Not all of our members are fluent in English, so I’m looking at some options to enable multilingual support on the website. Nopitch has already kindly translated our “Who are we” page to French, but it’s not live yet because we do not have a system yet for showing it.

Currently I’m considering to use https://wordpress.org/plugins/polylang/ along with https://wordpress.org/plugins/lingotek-translation/ ; does anyone have any experience with these, or with other free multilanguage plugins for wordpress?

We could go for simple google translate although for some reason it isn’t working on the website when I tested it (but we could try fixing it); the downside of that is that pure machine translation is still pretty bad, and at least for some important pages we definitely want manual translation.

Thoughts welcome.

[SnackitWH]

Sorry Mattie I dont know anything about google translator, polylang or lingotek. But I can offer to translate certain content to german 😉

[mattiejas]

Thanks Snack – offer much appreciated!! I may remind you of your offer at some point in the next weeks… 🙂

[83427]

so we have a english, german and france language choice. i think its enough atm.

translation into the czech language wont be needed i guess so let me know if you need to help with something else. i know HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL

[mattiejas]

Thanks 83 for offering your expertise! Much appreciated.

I’ve now done some test runs of polylang/lingotek on a dummy wordpress installation and it works pretty well. Basically we maintain separate pages (and menus) in different languages, where the plugin keeps track of which pages are translations of each other so if you switch language you can “stay on the same page” so to speak. Lingotek allows for automating the process, but that will cost us some more money in the long term… so we’ll stick with just polylang and only manually translate the long-term static content (i.e. not the blog or the forum, just who we are, crew rules, etc.). We can manually use google translate initially to speed things up a bit: even though the quality is very poor, it still saves a bit of time for translating the obvious bits.

I can translate to Dutch myself, Nop can handle French, and Snack can handle German. With that, we cover a reasonable part of Europe.

I’ll look at enabling google translate for the dynamic part of the website and for languages for whom we do not have a translator.

Sounds good?

[mattiejas]

I’ve now enabled google translate on the website. Let me know if you speak a language that isn’t included in the list of flags. I think I ticked every single language that I know is spoken in the crew, but as the list is rather long, it is quite possible that I missed one!

I’ll devote some time to enable a better quality translation of the static part of the website nearer to the end of this month (not earlier due to a busy work schedule in the next 2 weeks).

[HonkiPonkiTorino]

I can translate all posts into Turkish but there isn’t any Turkish expect me in this crew lol

[mattiejas]

Yes, it’s quite a big job, so let’s focus on the main ones first (French & German). Thanks for the offer though!

[_Kassz_]

Merci à vous tous pour se travail énorme que vous faite je vais pouvoir venire plus souvent sur le forum et m’exprimé merci beaucoup les amis 😉

[mattiejas]

Sorry I’ve left this for so long. It seems to me that the automatic translation serves us well enough, and since it’s such a large job and long time commitment to do manual translation, for the time being I’m content with the idea that we will stick to automatic translation only. I apologize if I gave anyone wrong expectations… Nop did translate our crew rules to French (thanks again!!!) and I even had my wife proofread it. I’ve now submitted corrections resulting from this effort to google translate so at least that effort is (hopefully – if google takes notice!) not entirely wasted.

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