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Clicky Looking For Translators; Are You Thinking Translation and Localization?
Online analytics service Clicky has announced their plans to translate and localize the service into about ten of their top requested languages. The languages include: German, Spanish, Portugese, Italian, Russian, Swedish, Turkish and Dutch. Facebook recently began a translation project as well.
This is a "community" project — that means Clicky is asking its users to do the translation. You select a language and are presented with a term to translate. After the translations are in the system, you can vote on which translation is best and then a winner for each needed translation will be selected. What I’d like to see added is a percentage of total completion for each language.
Are you thinking about translation and localization as you develop your Web applications? While not applicable in every case, localization can bring new visitors and potential incremental revenue. If you aren’t thinking of localization, please share your reasons why.
It’s not just the work of entering, it’s the software design it requires to use localization. Every little element ends up looked up from a database, it makes it harder to work on templates and make changes, its just not worth it in my opinion.
I think it’d be far more useful to make applications that needed far less localization, through just being easy to use on first glance. The incremental gains, in my experience, have not been worth the enormous work involved.
Localization causes major work, not only does it make the development of a website more complex, it also means that for every update, you have to adjust multiple languages too now.
Worst situation is to localize a website that was not built with that in mind.
At Supertext we built the first version just plain in one language without localization and now step by step we take localization into account (without actually transalating it yet). Once everything is “localization ready” we will do the translation into English, French and Italien (Currently we are only in German).
But localization is more thant just translating some text, now you have different timezones, different currencies, different ways to write dates, etc.
Also, most frameworks have good support for simple translation of static text, but what to do with all the lists that a DB driven?
The list goes on :-)
How do other people approach this? Am I making this too complex?
I forgot to say, it really depends on the nature of your service as well, in terms of is it worth it or not. We are very international, only 1/3 of our users are in the US, so for us it’s huge to do this. For more local services, or things that are only meant for US visitors, I would agree it’s not worth it.
It is a big pain in the ass to do this. I spent over 100 hours working on it! And I am planning to add a “percent done” next to each language, I just haven’t done it yet.
Remy, our system is really unique… this wasn’t mentioned in our blog post but I was planning to talk about it once we had some languages live. Whenever we update the English version of any term or phrase, it is flagged in our database as needing to be updated for the other languages too. For anyone looking at our translation page, they will see there are new terms that need updating, and they can submit their own or vote on submissions of others. The system will be auto-updating in the middle of the night every night so that new terms will be included in our localizations almost automatically (we’ll still be verifying new terms against online translation services first). This will be really amazing and takes away most of the headache of keeping everything up to date.
Morgan, I agree in some ways. Clicky is dead simple and doesn’t really need much localization if you are just looking at your stats. But there is much more to the service than that (documentation, many prefs/options, etc). There’s no way around that.