Translate site from English to German and Dutch

[DanSearle]

Hi,

I've created this site in English for a client -
http://www.pbmhairproducts.com/
and now they're talking about wanting the site available in German and Dutch - which will include translating all texts and also converting the product prices to Euros.

I understand from what I've been reading in the forum that Actinic cannot currently handle multi-language sites - I presume that's still the case. So I'll need two new copies of Actinic Catalog and two new domains right? And will have to create two new copies of the site - and the client will also have to be able to maintain their product catalog on three sites in total.

Does anyone have any experience of doing this? I'm interested in hearing about any pitfalls or particular problems I might come up against.

I'm not sure yet how the client is set up to maintain all this - one person to maintain all three sites, or three people to do it.

Cheers,
Dan

[jont]

Hi Dan,

could you not operate all the sites under the one domain and simply have 3 "sub-domains" for the 3 languages eg: pbmhairproducts.com/english, pbmhairproducts.com/dutch and pbmhairproducts.com/german and use a link off the home page to select your language? Then set actinic to work in each of the 3 directories in your chosen language.

[DaveT]

We looked at doing this but Actinic would require 3 site versions.

I know Jacques Meyruis (hope that's right...) ported it to French - have a search for that and it may shed some more light.

[DanSearle]

could you not operate all the sites under the one domain and simply have 3 "sub-domains" for the 3 languages eg: pbmhairproducts.com/english, pbmhairproducts.com/dutch and pbmhairproducts.com/german and use a link off the home page to select your language? Then set actinic to work in each of the 3 directories in your chosen language.

Hi, yeah, I guess that's true - but I'll still need three copies of Actinic with three seperate catalogs though? Which is where the bulk of the expense and work lie I think.

[magicalwonders]

Maybe Actinic Developer might be a consideration? There's not a huge difference in price between Developer and three copies of Catalog. Especially if you shop around. There are one or two good deals out there at the moment.

If the client ever decides to incorporate other languages in the future, Developer could end up being the cheaper solution.

Just a thought.

Myles
www.magicalwonders.com

[DanSearle]

Maybe Actinic Developer might be a consideration? There's not a huge difference in price between Developer and three copies of Catalog.

yeah might be - but they've already paid for one copy of Actinic Catalog. Dunno if you can upgrade that to a Developer licence, can you?

[magicalwonders]

Not sure. It might be worth an enquiry though.

Myles
www.magicalwonders.com

[cdicken]

Why not give our Sales Team a ring on 0845 129 4800. They can give you the prices for upgrades.

[DanSearle]

thanks, I'll pass that info on (I don't deal with buying the licences).


Noone has any experience to share about translating a site though? No particular pitfalls to be aware of that wouldn't be immediately obvious? This is what I've gleaned from reading the other threads about this -

There are parts of the emails that cannot be translated or changed from the original english.
Some sentences which are built up with chunks may be difficult to write in a different language.
Possible charset problems, although with German and Dutch that's probably ok.

And when it comes to handling orders from the three lang versions, the users (the site owners I mean) will have to process the orders in three seperate copies of Actinic - that's the only way right? Same with updating the product catalog - they'll need to keep all three prod catalogs in line manually?

[jont]

One option may be to use just the one copy of Actinic (thereby keeping the cost and the maintenance down) to build the site - have 3 copies of each section / products in the languages you need and use a manual navigation system so viewers can enter say the Dutch version and then all the navigation is geared around the Dutch products.

The checkout would need a little attention to have a multi language checkout for name, address etc and then the customer email confirmation could be in 3 languages also.

This would save on the cost of buying more Actinic, would keep site maintenance and order retreival under the one copy, products could be copied across as duplicates etc. The downside would be the manual navigation structure (not a big issue if the site is already established) and the multi language checkout

[DanSearle]

Thanks for the suggestion Jont. You're saying that for the check out pages and emails I would have to have all three languages shown on each page (rather than three versions of the same page), and all three langs in each email too? It's a good idea - I'll put it to my colleagues. But...
The UK version will be priced in Pounds Sterling, Dutch and German will be in Euros - I don't think I can achieve that in just one Actinic Site can I? Unless we charge everyone in Pounds and use an extra field to display the price converted to Euros. Not sure if they'd go for that or not.

[NormanRouxel]

You can get some idea of the scale of the job by opening (with Access) ActinicCatalog.mdb and looking in table Checkout Prompt. There are 1500 lines of text in there.

Note that these entries are often Perl format strings so respect the number and sequence of %s, %d, etc tags. These are replaced in sequence by internal variables and so must remain in place and in the same order after translation.

This may lead to problems in trying to get 3 languages onto the same prompt as you won't be able to re-use the %s and %d tags more than originally intended.

[DanSearle]

Thanks Norman, that's great - although I feel a bit sick having looked at that table...

Presumably that table holds all texts, even those that aren't actually used on our site?

Part of this job will be to prepare a list of texts that need translation, as we'll be using someone else to actually do the translations. For my part it would be easier to just give them the whole lot to do - but that's not likely to be very cost effective.

I'm also thinking the translators might have trouble with lines such as this -
"%s" is required for %s and must be between 0 and 255.

Those two %s will turn into different strings I guess - and the order the appear in the line must not change?
If in German that line has to read -
%s requires "%s" and it must be between 0 and 255
- then I have a problem I think?

[NormanRouxel]

I looked further at this and discovered the following. Of those 1500 phrases only 750 seem to end up in prompt.fil (on the server in acatalog). Hmmm.. Some could be obsolete (from earlier versions) and some not used in all configurations and omitted to keep the file size down. Or some other reason!

These phrases are usually output via a routine sub GetPhrase in ACTINIC.pm.

So here's an interesting experiment.

Say you had a single site but split into 3 sections, English, Dutch, German with duplicate products but text in alternative languages.

Whenever you're on a particular languages page set a cookie containing the current language.

Also change all the Design / Text stuff to have 3 strings separated by say $NL$ and $DE$ E.g. The phrase that would output "Goodbye Norman" was

Goodbye %s

and becomes

Goodbye %s$NL$Tod ziens%s$DE$Auf wiedersen%s

Now patch sub GetPhrase to check that cookie, then pick out and use only the appropriate string part. If the string doesn't contain any $NL$ or $DE$ then just return it as usual (not all strings need translating - some are internal code). If there's no cookie set then return the entire string (or the part up to the 1st $NL$ or $DE$) to default to English.

As to the prices you could just show them in both sterling and Euro as this is built-in already.