To deliver a unique experience to your website users and visitors, web agencies often customize templates and scripts for your CMS (Content Management System). What can be termed as a negative point in this action is, when you scale your website to support multiple languages, it results in a complex localization flow. The localization flow becomes highly complex as more settings are required to be done, in order to support the custom changes introduced in the CMS. Building a channel of content to the website in such a case users to tackle technical issues like:
Knowing how localize the content and what content properties localizable and what is not.
Deciding what content should be protected or excluded altogether.
Working out how to optimize content in a manner that it eases out integration with the translation tool.
Scripts localization issues like hardcoded strings, generation of content without language filters that must be fixed by developers before real translation.
To tackle and solve such complex integration issues, we offer our product the ‘iLangL Cloud’. It is designed specifically to help resolve all integration related problems of our customers irrespective of whether they have a single language, multilingual or multi-portal website. In this regard our website calibration services does not than aiding you in speeding up the processes of content localization. It also helps build an optimal channel, by linking your website and the translation tool. Our product ensures that no hurdle remains once our customers embark on the localization race.
To start working with our system you need to go through three stages, we call it calibration.
Calibration is a process of checking on the way if everything is setup properly and is as required and planned before running the localization process in actual. To perform this process you need understand the content structure and how to filter the content for translation, how to optimize content for translation for Translation tool and how to verify that all settings applied properly.
Content calibration process includes next steps:
Connection – establishing connection between iLangl cloud and customer’s CMS
Configuration – content filtering and content processing
Verification – final checking which includes verification in Translation tool, verification of translated content delivered back to client system and verification of the end result.
Why is calibration needed?
By default connector settings cover the simple and general setup of Content Management System (CMS). iLangl provides connectors which help with simple settings like installation of CMS and translating static content types. However, as websites are highly scalable and dynamic for efficient content localization website calibration becomes essential.
The connectors we offer cover most of the general configuration and they highly adjustable. However, it is difficult to completely match customer configuration to the translator settings by default as we cannot predict or know what elements might be there on the customer website. Complete and proper calibration of website requires additional work, as each CMS has its own configuration which is impossible to predict. Our website calibration service will help resolve this issue for you. We deliver a complete solution for better dynamic system integration. Thus, to set up the CMS properly, website calibration becomes essential.
Website calibration sounds complicated, we have simplified it for you and here is why you need it:
The key focus of iLangl is to make sure the multitude of changes made to your website’s content are always reflected in the translated versions. Hence, we recommend continuous localization of web content.
This is one of the key reasons we at iLangl have developed iLangL Cloud to ease the process of website calibration.
We have made it easy for our customers to move towards continuous localization resulting in continuous and accurate translation rather than restricting translation and localization into a one time project.
Let us take the case of Wordpress. Wordpress seems to be simple when we start to build integration. The CMS has more than 40,000 additional plugins which results in significant complexity during integration phase between wordpress and the translation environment. Thus. website calibration is the key to successful translation.
Channel connection
The first step before starting preparation content for localization is to establish a connection between iLangl cloud and customer’s CMS. This process is described in detail here. You should also to keep in mind that every CMS is specific and requires specific settings.
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After connection was established and ILangL Cloud has access to your CMS you have to clearly define what should be translated and what not. You have to let our system know what results you want to see after localization. For this you should make content configuration which includes two steps:
Content type configuration - clarification which types of content system should handle
Content filtering - tuning what items inside content types and according to what rules will be processed
Content types configuration
Our system transfers all content from CMS splitting by types. Content type is iLangl unique description of entity. Based on content type we handle content, we apply rules for export and import content. Every type is unique and has it’s own distinctive features. Each content type has its own unique individual settings. Each content type has rules like how to extract content and import content to CMS.
We are using very simple structure of content types. The structure of content type is as listed below.
Each section in the section list can be translated, which is extremely useful when you are building highly scalable, multi-lingual and CMS Portable websites. To avoid replication, speed up translation, and reduce translation costs, iLangl enables you to choose whether to translate a field or not.
For starting configuration process you should know which elements from your system should be translated. In some cases you need access to database and site backend to specify all list of content which you need.
Here you can find instruction which describes how to work with content types.
Content filtering types
In iLangl Cloud we are using two types of filtering:
Static filtering – management translatable fields with binding to the content types
Proactive filtering – tag processing.
If your site is simple without dynamic fields, the first type can be suitable and sufficient for you, for example you use Wordpress CMS without advanced plugins. But if Wordpress uses plugins with a lot of properties, which require further processing, you should use second type of filtering for successful fully localization.
Static filtering of translatable fields
For every content type that you are included in localization you can manage fields which will be translated or special rules how to handle them. How to manage translatable fields you can find information here.
If you prefer to filter content using tags processing, you can enable rule which makes all fields of current content type translatable and after that you can process fields using tags.
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Proactive filtering
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Proactive is more complex type of filtering and may require deep technical understanding how the site is built.
When your site is complex enough, proactive filtering is inevitable to translate its content properly. There are sophisticated CMSs, like Umbraco, that channel for it can be tuned correctly only through proactive filtering.
Proactive filtering is performed by applying rules how to handle tags.
As first step you should enable in section Content for all Content types fields for processing. For this you should set rule for including content using regular expressions. For example .+ means allow all properties.
After this you should set up replacement rules. For this you should activate 'Wrap values to tag' option in section 'Text'
Now tags are ready for configuration. For each tag, automatically detected by iLangL Cloud (your website original tags) or manually configured by the text encoding (here described wrapping text in tags) , it’s possible to customize processing flow. You can choose which content parts should be translated being split by tags. You can also use settings which were configured early. Just upload to the iLangL Cloud XML document with rules how to handle tags.
Each item may have it’s own translation rules. You can find detailed instruction how to process tags in the article.
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Verification is the final step that ends your calibration process.
All described actions you should make on your test environment and only after final verification you can transfer all settings to production environment.
Export content
After all configuration was done you need to make your first content export and verify if site is ready for final export. You should select language for testing and make pseudotranslation using Translation tool. After pseudotranslation was done you should to go through the exported content in Translation tool and analyze exported text. It should not include technical information, tags, special characters, you should see only that text splitted by segments which you want to translate.
If you see that some wrong information is present in exported fields, you should make configuration again.
If everything looks good, you can go to the import step.
Import content
After export to test language was done, you can do import and publish to test environment. After import and publish was finished, pay attention to the report, is it was fully successful. Then you should to check all places where content was translated, do they look good on the site?
If something wrong you need to check configuration again or fix bugs on the web site if it can not be configurated. After all fixes you need to repeat import and publish process.
This step can require couple of iterations before you sure that everything is looks good.