Bèr Kessels wrote:
The interface: And a good default?
We are collecting some great ideas here, and i expect actual work and actual code too. :)
One particular issue, though is still unclear. We already discussed the three areas of translation: interface, configuration, content.
The interface for the content translation is highly dictated by the workflow, so I doubt we can say something good about it. Two forms next to eacother for two languages? Tabs? fields under eachother? All possible solutions, but none can be *the* solution.
Ber, I was one of a couple people at Netscape (before AOL bought us) that created tools for "leveraging" (i.e., reusing translations between versions), and we tried a number of different ways of doing this. But we got an interesting response from the international group at IBM, and from localization professionals they worked with. They didn't care about our interfaces, or our tools. What they wanted was a simple way to get a text file out of our tool set that had the US English string, and a bit of contextual, explanatory information, like "this string is used in the File menu". Beyond that, they couldn't care less what our tools did. It wasn't that the tools weren't good. They were. But translation shops turn out to be very idiosyncratic about their work procedures, and are very suspicious of new tools. In the end, we figured out how to do inport and export (along with commenting information, which they cared a lot about), and that was almost the only features of our tool sets that they used. A really useful interface would be targeted not at the translators, but at the people that are "managing" the translators. The main thing the tool needs to do is make it easy to add "comments" to strings, so that when a translator sees a string like "I agree" (for example), they know that it's used on a button to indicate the user agrees to the terms of contract. The context will make it a lot easier for the translator to choose the right text in the target language. Those comments are very important information, and if our tools make it easy to reuse the comments even after we've changed strings in some modules, we'll have made it much easier to prepare translations into new languages quickly. But as far as the translators themselves: nice, simple text files are almost the best interface for translators you can find. Cheers, Rob Thorne Torenware Networks, and Netscape Communications, Way Back In the Day.