TOPIC:

Our tentative plan is to add Foreign Language support to FreeToastHost towards the end of 2015. No fixed deadline on that... The functionality will be released when it is ready to go. When it is finally implemented, there will be a Preferred Language setting that will be added to the Admin Console. We would try to adhere to the Preferred Language as much as possible. In essence, the fixed template text and report text is what would be translated.

We will need to address getting the translations done for each of the 8 languages that TM has announced they will support moving forward. We will probably need some help with the translations. Please expect further announcements about this as I make further progress on getting the coding done for it.

In order to help us prioritize our efforts, I thought it might be a good idea to get some sort of break down of preferred languages of our users, so I have put together this poll. In other words, when we have this functionality done, what would your Preferred Language setting be?

Obviously, we have English already, so I am more interested in what our users think that speak languages other then English.

Thanks!

Steve James

bump

how do I vote?
Spanish!
And I can help with translation

Muy bien, gracias!

I anticipate between 600-1000 sentences/phrases/text snippets will need to be translated. As FTH depends on a template where the system fills in information specific to each club, some sentences have text placeholders in them, which results in the sentences being broken up into phrases.

I can help you with translation to Chinese. Converting between simplified font and traditional font is straightforward, and there are tools that work quite reliably, but I would still proofread it before publishing. So if you decide to provide one, there is little cost to cover both.

The way this will work is that I will extract the relevant phrases out of the HTML files and other places and use that to populate a table that I have set up in the database. I will then provide a very basic user interface to the table for adding and updating translations of the phrases. The user interface will be totally separate and different from the website system.

I have already done some work on the text extraction code, but it is not finished.

There will also be files that will need to be translated. The default member welcome text is a very good example of that, since it also has variables in it.

One of the approaches to this that I am considering is using a free crowd sourced translation platform, such as Ackuna:

thenextweb.com/insider/2013/09/13/ackuna-matata-meet-the/

The advantage of this approach is that while we would certainly benefit from Toastmasters members doing the translations, we would not need to be entirely dependent on them with this approach. (no pressure that way)

Having Toastmasters members involved would serve to provide some "quality control" for the translations.

That is a good idea Steve. That way it could be up sooner and as the Toastmaster volunteers have time they could improve the translations. Now, would we have access to make the modifications ourselves or would it have to go through one of the admins?

By using a different platform for managing the translations, we can set it up to include whoever we want (access managed separately). Would not need to be an admin that way.

Another one we are looking at is OneSky.