How to translate your company?

Feb 07

How to translate your company?

As we work from a small country in a international company from the very beginning it was important for us to translate our website, every document we write on several languages, and create our software with proper i18n support. On this path we have already gathered some insights, and we hope you will find these useful too, and perhaps could share your view as well. So how do we hold our translations up-to-date on several languages?

First things first

First of all we have selected one of our collegues to be responsible for every translation job in the company. He is the one who coordinates the translators' work, receives new source and translated files as well, and sends them back to their source.

Second, as there are hundreds of languages in the world, we decided on a language preference list. No document is written before the same document exists on a more important language. (Was this correct english? Anyway, let's continue.)

English
German
Russian
Hungarian
Roumanian

As we are from Hungary, and have people who speak good English and/or German, but never both, Hungarian actually become the 2nd on the list, but this was a must. So we always keep in mind that the German translations are more important to have them ready.

An interesting insight that came out from this ordering was that one of our collegues who was not very friendly with our international-openness actually accepted this decision, and his approach changed a lot thanks to this small decision. This showed us how important well articulated decisions are.

Bits and bytes

But what software do we use? Actually we use only one, but recommend two others. The reason is very simple. We use pootle to administer software translations. This is an immense help. We just wrote two scripts that syncs between our repository (managed with Bazaar) and pootle's, and that's all. This way our translation files are always up-to-date, and the translators can easily reach them whenever they see fit.

Then we have tested several tools to help the translators choose the best software. Our earlier work as IT consultant thought us that users are not always stupid, they are usually simply ignorant. Thus pointing them out some good applications can change their usual workflow. As we work with student and amateur translators to do the job we decided to check out these apps quickly as they often don't have the necessary background. Finally, we've found 5 notable applications:

The first two apps are closed source, proprietary apps for translators. They are well-known in the translating industry, but as we were looking for some software for students our main interest was in their feature lists. There we've learned terms like translation memory (TM), TM server, glossary, vocabulary etc... So we were looking for this functionality in the other applications.

We have found that virtaal is really nice and easy to use under Windows and Ubuntu 9.10+, but failed to make it run under Ubuntu 8.4 (LTS) in 5 minutes. Otherwise it seems the be a really nice software. Besides Virtaal, OmegaT can handle po files as well.

Then for our promotional material and website we have two tools, for the offline guys we recommend OmegaT. It's a really nice software, but a bit slow. On the other hand for the wired we opt for Google Translator Toolkit. in either case we use only one translation memory for everything (per language), and we expect that in the future this will allow us to get a huge efficiency gain.

As one tool is often better than two, we are going with OmegaT and have dropped Virtaal. But Google's Translator Toolkit stays still as it's the easiest to use.

Setting up OmegaT

An OmegaT project consists a whole directory structure. For every project you can define where your translation memories, glossary and dictionary files are stored, and you should put your translatable files under another subdirectory. Similarly the translated files will be generated in a 5th directory.

In order to gain the most synergy from our translations, we recommend to set up the system as the following directory structure:

translations/toolpart
- tm
- glossary
- dictionary
- project1
  - target
- project2
  - target

while the source directory can be set to anywhere on the system.

This is our workflow. Do you have some other ideas? We would be really interested in them.

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ToolPart Team