Smartling - multilanguage 3rd party provider

How to make your website multilingual with a 3rd party translation tool

Background

As is: 5 year legacy website with 2 languages, English and Chinese. Each language is compiled as a separate build, with Chinese version not finalized.

To be: website with top 10 world languages, including the Chinese version, an RTL language, in parcitular:

  • Chinese simplified

  • Spanish

  • Malay

  • French

  • Portuguese

  • Japanese

  • German

  • Turkish

  • Korean

  • Arabic

Bird-eye view on the tool and the integration

Smartling provides a number of different services, including:

  • human translation

  • machine translation

All of the translations are managed in the Translation Management System - web console Smartling provides, which indicates what is to be translated, provides the possibility to configure different translation workflows, see statuses, and so on.

Based on the contract and package signed with Smartling, you might get different services and access level.

Key solution design points

  • We have decided to get rid of the Chinese build, which would be totally replaced by Smartling.

  • We would configure traffic routing to the corresponding language prefixes, so that when customer selects the Chinese version, he would be redirected from website.com to website.com/zh-CN. All the other languages would follow the same logic.

What you need to know

Overall implementation approach

We discussed 2 approaches to translation:

  1. Localization file

  2. Website crawling

â˜Ŗī¸We do not recommend using the localization file if you are able to use the crawling, because crawling:

  • speeds up your delivery in terms of resources and deadlines

  • simplifies the overall process

How to work with the crawling

  1. Configure the routing

  2. Configure the automation rules

  3. Ask Smartling to launch a bot to crawl the website

    1. The part of the website that requires authentication can be crawled only if you have a corresponding service package. Make sure to check that

    2. If your package doesn't have it - just crawl those pages manually

  4. Authorize the content for translation in the Smartling console

End result:

  1. Content translated by Machine Translation - should be available of your website right away

  2. Content to be translated by Human Translation - will be available as soon as the Smartling team performs the translation

ℹī¸You are able to see the status of the translations in the Jobs section of the Smartling console

Key entities/terms of the Smartling system

  1. Translation automation rules

  2. Jobs

  3. Strings

Translation automation rules is a set of rules configured to translate your content, including:

  • rules of the translation authorization (who has the final say to approve the translation and the cost for it)

  • domains to be translated

  • tool/workflow to be used (Machine Translation ot Human Translation)

Key hurdles and takeaways

If:

  1. you do not have a clear understanding of your system, routing can become an issue

  2. you have different components for the same part of the system (Angular and Magento on front-end, for example) - this also increases your efforts for the integration

  3. the "authenticated" bot is not included in your package - pay special attention to the translation of the pages that require authentication

Discuss beforehand:

  • what is to be translated automatically, and what - manually

  • who is authorized to approve the translation

  • how are "authenticated" pages to be crawled

  • the part of the system overall, and elements on the pages you don't want to be translated

Free technical consultation on smartling integration

Book a quick sync up with our CTO if you need a helping hand or visit our website:

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