Localizing HTML documents

Continuing my search into internationalizing and localizing the 48 lessons for RUR-PLE and asking all around I have raised a few very meaningful feedbacks from my community: it’s a lot of work to recode HTML pages and insert language tags, it also makes authoring a lot more complicated and not for everyone. Imagine a teacher wanting to add lesson No.49, he’ll have to understand the technique behind it and thus learning a bit of HTML is probably a lot easier. So what you gain from simplifying the work for translators is lost in hindering authoring.

Well actually NO! A big THANK YOU to Elly for pointing out this great Java application to me: OmegaT. OmegaT let you open XHTML, HTML, Microsoft Office 2007 XML, OpenOffice.org/StarOffice, XLIFF (Okapi), MediaWiki and plain text files and hides the code to the translator. Translators just see what needs to be translated, can use shared memory per project (you create projects inside the application) and thus avoids you to re-translate something you already translated, and export in the same format as the original document without touching the markup. I’ve tried with HTML and presentation files and wow it just works as it should. Great gain of time, no need to internationalize anything for your project (and mine) and anyone can now generate new lessons without having to worry about the translators.

This is also going to help me in my daily work, where I get presentation files in different languages all the time and spend hours editing them slide by slide. On top of that, this is Open Source Software (GPL) and cross platform (using Java). What else could you ask for? I just regret to have discovered it so late. 😉

4 thoughts on “Localizing HTML documents

  1. It’s always helpful to use some tools 😉 In return, I found the lessons you mentioned might be helpful for me and for my nephews. – It’s funny that this leads me to tell a story: I once confused with “nephew” and “niece” ^O^…

  2. and that’s just a beginning. We’re actually planing to have similar materials for other applications as well. So a lot of work ahead of us, and now we have the right tool thanks to you! 😀

  3. OmegaT has been around for a long time already. The user group hosted at Yahoo is very friendly and multilingual. Development is ongoing and I suggest you use version 1.8 (the beta version) because it contains a spellchecker too.

    Welcome to OmegaT !

  4. Jean-Christophe, it does indeed look like a very mature product and as I mentioned, I only regret that I discovered it so late! Thank you for your visit and believe me when I say I am telling all my friends about it!! This is such a useful application.

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