Translating over purchased applications to a language with different structure

I'm not sure how many of you out there have this problem but we, at times, find it much faster and easier to purchase a whole product (with the rights to change it up for our needs) and then translate it over to provide a solution for our clients or ourselves that is required for a project. Generally these products will have the ability to change over the language easy enough by placing "language" files in the application and have all the pages use these files to put in the strings for everything.

The latest we have at the moment is actually a mailing list application. I suppose it would be possible to go ahead and actually build our own, but with all the other development going on over here right now, we just are lacking in a competent developer with time to do it.

So it's a purchase and off to translation world.

We generally translate from English to Japanese (every once in a while the other way around, but there aren't many J apps that we want) and the problem isn't so much just converting words over. If it was, I'd be done in about 50% of the time it actually requires to do these change overs. The thing is that most of the translations actually have to have their orders changed around due to the major differences in grammer etc.

Take for example this:

strHello = "Hello"
strHowAreYou = "How are you"
strToday = "today"

In English we would do this:
greeting = strHello + " " + userName + ", " + strHowAreYou + " " + strToday + "?";

In Japanese the whole string for "greeting" would not only have to have it's order changed around, but all the spaces would have to be taken out.
strHello = "こんにちは、"
strHowAreYou = "お元気ですか"
strToday = "今日"

greeting = strHello + "さん。" + strToday + "は" + strHowAreYou + "?";

I'm starting to wonder if it is worth it to only doing the translation and not building from scratch... But in this case, we will now have an English and Japanese version so I guess it is.. *thinking out loud here*

ho hum..

Anyways, it's most definitely interesting and takes away some of the mundane feeling of "just translating", although at times can be time consuming when some sentences just don't go together so well. In those cases, sentences get deleted and others built into one long sentence.

This doesn't even touch on the "change-languages-on-the-fly-multilingual" apps that we put together as that is a completely different story... Definitely adds that "extra touch" to the development of a site or application.

OK, back to translating for me..

Posted by Graeme at June 8, 2005 10:55 AM