Cultivating tangible change
Multilingual Tools
Most of our team has first hand knowledge of what it’s like to live in foreign countries, and we’ve all been affected by the limitations of websites that offer content in multiple languages as well as the tools to let site administrators translate content. Frankly, we didn’t like the options, and we don’t like that most of our clients – international development organizations – deal with frustrations on this front every day.
That’s why we’re leading the development of a multilingual Drupal platform. In the past two years we’ve built many modules to facilitate multilingual websites and had a hand in overhauling how Drupal handles multiple languages. Much of this work is in Drupal 6, and we’re already hard at work to make Drupal 7 even more fully multilingual.
We know that handling multilingual content is difficult. To do it well requires an effective workflow, an intuitive architecture, and integrated modules that help users handle multiple languages. We also know that simply putting content into another language doesn’t usually resonate with our clients' audiences who come from distinct backgrounds and cultures. Effective translations require some strategy and planning to address these sensitivities and maximize the impact of content in other languages. Your online tools should help you accomplish that impact, and we have the skills and the experience to help our clients do that.
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Strategy Focus
Using the Localization Server to Push the Spanish Translation of Drupal Forward
More Localization Servers Coming Online
More Localization Servers Coming Online
So now we have this nice localization server that's still in alpha version but is already quite useful to do translations - particularly community translations. Now instead of using the old issue tracker and cvs method which worked but was not very user friendly, we have a web interface that any user can use to post translation suggestions, and then these suggestions can be approved - or rejected - with a single click and added to the exportable po file.
We at Drupal Hispano just couldn't wait to see it installed on drupal.org, so we've set up our own localization server for the Spanish speaking Drupal community.
It seems that other local communities have had the same idea, including the Norwegian, French, and Dutch communities (thanks to Jo Wouters at Krimson for telling me about the Dutch translation work that's happening).
We've just started and the site is not mature yet, but it is working for a few projects and releases and gives a glimpse as to what is possible. The localization server, using the local package connector, allows full control over which projects and releases are imported. It also allows for translation team management, integration with Organic Groups, and an approval workflow in which some users may post translation suggestions and others may review and approve them.
So the next time I come across a translation I can fix or add, I can now just go to the translation site and post my suggestion. Or if I have a better translation already exported in a file, I can post the file to the site and then it can be imported and stored as a translation suggestion for later review.