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→Multilingual Sites and Translation Management in Drupal
Anas outlined a key hurdle in handling translations online. Currently there are only two main ways of creating a multilingual website. The first involves hiring someone to create multiple versions of the same website in different languages which is what is done for corporate websites. The second method involves utilizing a translation tool to automatically translate the website. Each of these methods has their own advantages and disadvantages. In the case of the first method, it is more costly both in time, effort and money, depending on whether or not someone was hired for the job or not. However the first approach provides a highly accurate translation of the website. The second method, because it is automated tends to be cheaper and faster, however its translation accuracy generally ranges from poor to just barely adequate. What Anas proposed was system that combines the two methods of translation. An automated system would carry out the initial translation of a webpage while a human user would correct any mistakes made by the automated translator. Doing so would take advantage of the strength’s of the two methods while mitigating their faults.
The second half of his presentation dealt with how Drupal handles the automated translation of pages and I had to admit that most of what he talked about went over my head. The only thing I understood was that Drupal’s translator, in the process of translating a website, breaks the website down into two different components and assigns each section into a separate domain. The first one, L10N deals with the websites localization information and deals mainly with (I think) how the content and characters are presented on screen. For instance Japanese text is read from right to left rather than left to right as you would in English and most Indo-European languages. Taking care of that language based layout of the text would be one of the responsibilities of the L10N domain. The second domain, I18n handles translating the actual content itself. He did mention that Drupal currently doesn’t support translating the strings in a website though I wasn’t sure what he meant by this. If domain I18n is already translating the websites content, then wouldn’t it already be translating the strings as well?
My impression of Anas’ view of open source is that it can be used to develop the tools necessary to make the internet truly global and by truly global I don’t just mean that everyone has access to it but has access to the content and information from people’s websites from around the world. The language gap is one of the elements that still restrict people’s access to information in the web, by creating a tool that can quickly, cheaply and accurately translate the websites of people around the world, that barrier can be greatly weakened if not removed altogether.