[solved??]is automatic translation of a website "on the fly" possible with MODx?

Hello There,

I am building a website and the front end of the site needs to be available in English (default) plus Dutch, German, Korean, Japanese and some other languages (neither of which I can speak at the moment!) - changeable by clicking on a flag icon.

I have been looking through the forums and the wiki but can’t seem to clarify the following:

Is there a method available within MODx that automatically translates the content "on the fly" (eg as you are browsing through a site) - or which automatically converts and then say caches content when a change is made to one of the default language page?

Or do I actually have to manually create / maintain the content for each relevant page in each of the other languages?

In which case, if a change is made say to the default (English) About Us page, do I literally have to somehow manually translate that change and paste that into the About Us equivalent for each of the other 5 languages?

If manual translation can only be achieved with MODx, can someone recommend a good "on the fly" method as the client does not have the resources or the language skills to manually maintain the site in multiple languages.

(I have found these 2 techniques but presume you still have to manually create / paste the content in:
http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Make_Multi_Lingual_Site
and
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,29597.0.html
)

Thanks and all the best.

As you’ve guessed, MODx doesn’t translate on the fly.

It will allow you to have specific words and phrases in multiple languages to be used in things like form instructions and error messages but everyone I know of with a multiple language site maintains separate versions of each page or chunk of text.

MODx *will* make it easy to make templates that will plug in chunks in a the appropriate language for any static text you have, so the only thing that needs to be worked on is the content that changes.

I don’t think any on-the-fly translator will produce very acceptable text. Google Translator will translate a web page for you and you could put links to their translation service on your pages. That would give people the option to see a translation without ruining your reputation by having a bad translation appear on your site, although I’m not sure what it would do to the chunks that are already in the target language.

Here’s bobsguides.com in French: http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fbobsguides.com&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=en&tl=fr. My French isn’t good enough to tell how bad it is.

Hi BobRay,

Thanks for clearing that up so quickly.

Who has time for manual translations?

That’s a real pity - I have seen that other CMS’s offer seamless plugins that enable automatic translation so unfortunately, I think I will have to jump boat and use another CMS for this site.

The French translation looks fine and very French to me!!!

Thanks again.

The google translation of my site to swedish translates the category name ’stuff’ as ’fill in’ which makes the catogory say: fylla (being drunk -in swe)

To use a translator is cool for finding out context, not for reading. There is software that can see context and replace a sentance, but its still going to sound robot and be wrong.

For a professional website you could first have the text automatically translated and then have someone speaking the language edit and correct the text.

Quote from: nickf08 at Dec 04, 2008, 06:49 PM

Hi BobRay,

Thanks for clearing that up so quickly.

Who has time for manual translations?

That’s a real pity - I have seen that other CMS’s offer seamless plugins that enable automatic translation so unfortunately, I think I will have to jump boat and use another CMS for this site.

The French translation looks fine and very French to me!!!

Thanks again.

Please don’t abandon MODx on that account. I’m 99.9% positive that no other CMS has it’s own built-in translator. They are feeding the stuff through Google Translator, Babblefish, or something similar (and they are showing pages with glaring usage errors, comical misstatements, and untranslated words that the translation software didn’t recognize).

I don’t think it would take much of an effort to write a snippet or plugin for MODx that would do the same. For that matter, the link I just gave for Bob’s Guides could easily be put behind an image link showing a french flag and would translate the page on the fly every time someone clicked on it.