For months folks have been asking when we were going to get our stuff together and start offering Pagelime in multiple languages. We’ll the wait’s over, and as always we tried to raise the bar on internationalization for a web-app: We have developed an interface for you to translate Pagelime into any language or language-culture combination right from your account management dashboard!

In your account settings you can set a default language for all users in your account from existing translations. You can also set a language for each user you create in Pagelime – simply edit a user and select the desired language from the drop-down.

We currently have the following languages, which have all been submitted by actually PageLime users:

• English (ahem)
• Spanish
• Swedish
• French
• Dutch
• Italian

If we don’t offer your language or culture specific translation (such as French-Canadian instead of just French), you can go into the Manage Languages section from the Account Dashboard, and create a new translation! When creating a translation, you have to specify the language you’re translating into, and simply proceed through the list of terms and phrases that need to be translated. Once you are finished, you can submit your translation for approval, we will approve it, and it will become available for use in Pagelime. In order for the translation to be approved, all of the phrases must have a translation! Your progress is auto-saved as you go, so don’t worry about losing your work at any point, you can come back and finish your translation any time.

If a language already exists you will not be able to create a duplicate, but you will be able to create a culture specific version of the language. For example, there are subtle differences between English spoken in GB and the USA, so you could create a Brittish English translation. In this case you do NOT have to translate all of the phrases, but ONLY the ones that are different, as the rest will be inherited from the base English language.

Important note: For now we only offer the translation for the client areas of Pagelime. The account management areas will remain in English. We’re working to add these fields to the translation list, but it would make it much harder for you to submit a custom translation file (there would be a lot more to translate), and most folks care about what their clients see.

Now for some thoughts on how we approached translation and why we community-sourced it

Why have we waited so long to offer translations?
Pagelime is a product that is constantly growing, and we try to rapidly adapt to user needs as more feedback comes in, and we continuously refine our user experience. We had not reached a point where our user-experience was cemented enough for us to feel confident that we won’t be adding, removing, or changing labels around – something that would be quite hard if we had dozens of languages.

Why did we allow users to submit and manage translations?
We have a global community of users, and it was the fastest way to get the widest possible coverage. I’ve had mixed experiences with translation agencies back in my website development days, and after seeing the success facebook has had with community-sourcing translations, we were convinced that this was the way to go. This was actually a more expensive option than just paying for translations, as the number of engineer man-hours that went into this system was way more expensive than just paying for translators. But, we feel that this will pay off in the future, as we’re planning on adding a lot more optional and labs features to the system, and we wanted to have a flexible way for the community to translate these when they are ready to use them.

Let us know what you think, and definitely let us know if you’re thinking of submitting a translation!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 26th, 2010 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.