Multilingual CMS Guide

Translation Outsourcing Cost Considerations

envoytrading — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:16:21 +0000

When it really matters, use people to translate
There’s pretty wide-spread acceptance that a human doing the translation is going to yield a better final product than machine translation. There may be times when using machine translation software is an acceptable alternative, or even an effective starting point for human translation, but when it comes to communicating the essence of your company and product…there ‘s really no substitute for thoughtful human translation.

Using internal staff for translation work
Some companies keep costs low by tapping their immediate staff. If a member of your staff is capable of translating your content into a desired language, this can lower costs vs. paying an outside agency and you may even get added benefit if your staff translator is a subject matter expert. As you broaden the languages you wish to offer content in, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll need to look outside for human translation assistance.

Several factors affect translation outsourcing costs
The cost of outsourcing the translation from one language to another is based on several factors. These can include: the number of words it takes to convey the information in the target language, the complexity of the languages involved, the subject matter, turn-around time and specifically which languages are involved.

Translation Pairs
The language you are translating from and the language you are translating to also impact costs. For example – 600 general topic English words translated into Japanese might run about $115 at an agency, whereas 600 Dutch, Czech or Greek words translated into Japanese at the same agency could run 50% more, and French to Japanese could be 15% less than the English. This can be due to availability of translators for the languages in question, agency geographic location and reputation. You can run your own calculations selecting different from and to languages at Translated.net

A web page is easier to translate than an entire web site
Translating of text from a document or web page is a more straight-forward and lower cost process than translating or localizing an entire web site. “Isn’t a web site just a collection of web pages” you may ask? Yes, but…localization of a web site is not limited to just the translation of your content. Error messages, alerts and HTML elements like page titles, keywords, page descriptions and “alt” tags also need proper localization to ensure visitors have a good experience and to maintain and maximize search engine indexing. Text in images and graphics should be considered as well. Other considerations may include whether your web site uses a database, Flash components, forms and scripting languages.

For more specific costs, see the web site translation estimator
(by Translated.net)

Using a CMS
A web content management system (or “CMS”) can automate many aspects of international language web sites. One translation company even offers a Human Translation API, whereby your content management system can automatically send text out for translation and receive it back into the system. Generally the human translation process is not thought to be ripe for automation, but by using innovative Web Services such as a human translation API or leveraging a CMS that can support XLIFF, the process of including high quality human translated content is speeding up.

If you have questions about this post, you can send us an email.

Using Machine Translation to Automate Language Conversion

envoytrading — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:09:44 +0000

Leveraging ”Machine Translation” Software
If your CMS supports built-in machine translation, your content can be automatically translated from or to any supported language. Commonly supported languages:

• Chinese Simplified
• Chinese Traditional
• Dutch
• English
• French
• German
• Greek
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Portuguese (Brazilian)
• Russian
• Spanish

Advantages of this method are that it is automated, fast, easy and inexpensive.

: Machine Translation example (CMS400.NET)

Does it work?
As you might expect, it’s a good idea for someone fluent in the languages to review the machine translated content to make sure it’s appropriate. Even if you decide to have someone “clean it up”, it can be an effective starting point vs. having someone fluent in both the source and target languages do the translation. Some content management systems may offer additional language translation controls to increase the suitability of machine translated content. For example CMS400.NET let’s you specify a glossary by field, industry or subject area. The glossary helps the built-in translation software find the best translation for terms that have different meanings depending on the usage.

What about Images?
It’s easy to forget about images, but most pages have them in addition to the text that can be helped by machine translation. Which images get translated is up to you. Images like photographs containing no text are usually not an issue, allowing the same image to be used across all translated pages. Some images, however, may need to be changed because they are less culturally appropriate. In this case, or if images contain words that need tranlation, your content management system should be able to pair the content translated to German (for example) with the images you would like presented to your German-speaking web site visitors.

Other Ways to Automate the Translation of Content
Even if you translate your content manually yourself or in-house, using a CMS can provide significant automation by letting you leverage the work done in your default language. If manual translation involves the use of an outside translation house, take a look at your CMS’ support for the XLIFF file standard. The ability of the web content management system to check-in and check-out XLIFF files used by the translation house streamlines the process considerably for multilingual web sites outsourcing their translation requirements. Learn more about using XLIFF to automate translation.

If you have questions about this post, you can send us an email.

Using XLIFF to Automate Language Translation

envoytrading — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:08:11 +0000

What is XLIFF?
XLIFF stands for “XML Localization Interchange File Format”. XLIFF is a format that’s used to exchange localization data between participants in a translation project. Using XLIFF, translators can concentrate on the text to be translated, without worrying about text layout. The XLIFF standard is supported by a large group of localization service providers.

That means if you use an outside translation house that supports XLIFF (for example: Translated.net), you can receive translated files back in the XLIFF file format and this local language content can be easily incorporated into the CMS400.NET content management system. Using an outside translation house is just one way to populate content in the languages your web site will support. Other methods are to translate the content manually or use machine translation.

Summary of the XLIFF export/import process

XLIFF export example in CMS400.NET

Within CMS400, you select the content to be translated. This might include: a content item, a folder, menus, taxonomies (which are subject categories for content in the system).
CMS400 will let you prepare the files for translation into several languages at once. A separate .xlf file is created for each item. Then, all .xlf files for a language are compressed into a .zip file, with a separate zip rolling up all the files for each specified language.
These zips by language can be sent to a translation agency, who supports XLIFF, for the translation to be performed.
Once the agency has returned the translated the files (they must have the extension .xlf), they can be imported back into the content management system.

The XLIFF format standard is currently 1.2. In 2009 the requirements gathering stage for XLIFF 2.0 began. You can get more information by visiting www.xliff.org

Finding a content management system that supports XLIFF can be important if you plan to send content to an outside service provider for translation. If you have questions about this post, you can send us an email.

Another method of content translation is using software to automate the process. Learn more about Machine Language Translation.

Welcome to Multilingual CMS Guide

envoytrading — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 04:45:40 +0000

Hello and welcome to “Multilingual CMS Guide”
This blog is devoted to the topic of creating and maintaining multi-language web sites. Specifically we focus on how software, referred to as a web content management system or “CMS”, can be used to automate this process.

example CMS400.NET language settings screen

Please explore the posts. I hope the information is helpful. You can email me if you have questions. Thanks for visiting!

Lee Mayfield
Author