Languages

[Hellator]

I'm curious about the community doing all the languages. I think it would help this product a lot more if IPB staff took over development on languages. It would further increase people on the forums. (Not saying for the current staff to do it, but hiring others to do language translations if your not yet already)

I was looking around and saw this back end server translator. Might be worth taking a look at.

http://www.systransoft.com/

Thanks,
Helladen

[bfarber]

The problem is, we cannot validate translations since we don't speak any other languages, so officially stamping language packs becomes "dangerous" for us. We essentially have to release something that we don't even know what it says.

[Hellator]

Understandable. Hiring someone to check the translations works as well. But good point after all, and it could get costly for you guys, but its all up to you if its worth doing.

[GodForum.com]

There are no problem and only solutions.

I have been trying to get a French language pack installed on a new forum and 4 different people couldn't do it and delayed my plans after I was told

by IPS in a ticket that it would be easy.

Invision Power HAS to figure the language thing out. Consider the fact below.

Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook, on October 28, 2003 and has been translated to over 100 languages.

Possible Solutions

1. Include fields so WE can EASILY put the language terms on KEY Labels QUICKLY.
2. Partner up with others in each language and work TOGETHER at this.
3. Outsource this
4. Add Google Translate (by the way this should be included already in the core)

[Mark]

We do already have extensive documentation on translating our products for users who are multi-lingual. You simply go through and replace the English strings with whatever language you require - it really couldn't be much easier.

There are also several third parties who provide translations - I know of sites for French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Polish and Russian - and we also provide an area for language packs which further includes Arabic, Icelandic, Persian, Finnish, Bulgarian, Chinese, Turkish, Dutch, Catalan and Romanian.

As Brandon says, it's difficult to give an "official" stamp on these since we cannot verify the majority of them, however, I don't really think there is a need for it. Presumably any person installing a language pack speaks that language (or has a member of their staff speaking it) who would want to review it anyway - I can't imagine anyone putting something on their website they can't understand.

[Mikhail]

We do already have extensive documentation on [url="http://community.invisionpower.com/resources/documentation/index.html/_/documentation/administrator-control-panel/look-and-feel/manage-languages-r116"]translating our products[/url] for users who are multi-lingual. You simply go through and replace the English strings with whatever language you require - it really couldn't be much easier.

I thought so, too, until I started my own translation... Do you seriously think translation of around 10 000 strings is an easy deal? Ok, I have only public part translated, so only 5000 (btw, did you ever think to put a language switch to ACP?). Maintaining a translation appeared to be a hard and time-consuming work which you have to repeat each time there's an update to the software. And I am not going into details such as fighting against hard-coded texts and having to ensure changed strings won't affect formatting of the page (who cares if "Ok" is pure English word, they just reserve space for 2 chars and don't care of their Russian users who wants to see something like "Выполнить" there)

I am pretty sure that once a person desides to pay $300 for a product they do it because they just want to have a complete product without having to contribute their time to it (at list this is what I think when buying a commercial product instead of using free source).

[/size][size="2"]There are also several third parties who provide translations - I know of sites for French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Polish and Russian - and we also provide an area for [url="http://community.invisionpower.com/files/category/107-language-packs/"]language packs[/url] which further includes Arabic, Icelandic, Persian, Finnish, Bulgarian, Chinese, Turkish, Dutch, Catalan and Romanian.[/size][size="2"]

Not sure for the rest of the world, but if to talk about Russian commercial 3rd party translation - users who buy the product from them can't have official IPS support with access to all community resources (they have a separate license and they modify code), so I find more and more new users starting to use my language pack, and after some time I get criticizm about it's quality - but hell it's free, and I do it just for fun. So there's only two choices for your potential new Russian clients for the same money, and both are bad.

If not IPS Customer Relations department who responded to me that you have language packs avalable but forgot to mention the Russian one was outdated, not for all products, and maintained by a 3rd person, not a professional, when I was thinking if to buy your product or not, I'd never become your client [ticket #624968].

As Brandon says, it's difficult to give an "official" stamp on these since we cannot verify the majority of them

All you need is to hire/outsource one translator per language or review your relationsip with 3rd parties-translators and make them contribute to the official repository.

however, I don't really think there is a need for it. Presumably any person installing a language pack speaks that language (or has a member of their staff speaking it) who would want to review it anyway - I can't imagine anyone putting something on their website they can't understand.

Well, if your repository had all of the above mentioned languages officially available, and IPB engine supported full translation of all strings once switching between them (do you know that, for example, Board Guidelines can be translated only to one language, and you do it manually in ACP without ability to change it in language pack?), I'd install all of these languages for sure to make my community worldwide!

My personal opinion IPB seriously lacks internationalization and you do lose many clients because of that. And makes me upset, bearing in mind IPB is the only product I find with forum, galleries, front page, files and blogs.

Come on, you are the leaders, time to become fully international and overtake world's market!

[Anthony.]

If this is difficult maybe the wrong people are working on the problem.

Facebook started AFTER IPS and they have over 100 languages. Shameful in retrospect. :o

XenForo already had this planned out from inception ...

maybe you should take a look at their site

Listen to Kier ... his product was just born and they have a solution. :whistle:

"Not only is it fully phrased, we have developed a crowd-sourcing translation system built on top of the XenForo framework,
so that you all can help us to produce non-English versions in record time.
We will deploy the translator on XenForo.com hopefully in the next few days."


xf-language

[Mark]

Facebook started AFTER IPS and they have over [size="5"]100 [/size]languages. Shameful in retrospect. :o

Crowd sourced languages isn't an ideal solution. Facebook recently had for several days an offensive term instead of 'Birthdays' in their Spanish language pack.

[Anthony.]

Crowd sourced languages isn't an ideal solution. Facebook recently had for several days an offensive term instead of 'Birthdays' in their Spanish language pack.

Nothing major they still got into a hundred new markets ...

no solution is perfect, just better ... :rolleyes:

[Mark]

Nothing major they still got into a [u]hundred new markets[/u] ...

no solution is perfect, just better ... :rolleyes:

Personally, I would consider releasing anything with an official label on that turned out to contain offensive messages unacceptable.

[Hellator]

The old forum I came from simple machines is free and they offer about 20 languages. There product is far below this one, but for being free there doing a hell of a job. Nothing can be perfect, but if you offer more, it will allow more people to join, and thus increasing marketing sales.

[philversprechend]

I would like to see official language packages as well. I can understand that it is a problem for a company to support languages none of the employees speaks and that external translators cost money. But I'm using IP.Board for a german community and there are still a lot of people out there who don't speak english or prefer to use their native language.

The community here does a great job in translating IP.Board, but they are doing it in their spare time and sometimes it takes a lot of time until the software is translated. At the moment there is only one german language package for IP.Board and there are no translations for addons like IP.Blog or IP.Content. So now I have to translate it myself (which is very timeconsuming). So I would prefer to have official language packages right from the first day an application is published.

Maybe you guys from IPS can come up with a solution for this problem. But I will stick with IP.Board nonetheless.

[LegionWM]

I found a Traditional Chinese version for 3.1.x, but not Simplified. Does anyone know of such a thing?

[IPBSupport.de]

I think it is ok and not a big problem to support official languagepacks, ... if IPS would do that.

But at the moment (and unfortunately for years) they do not appear to support multilanguage software OFFICIAL!

And thats the big problem for the international market. You cant make a "good job" or just "many sales" on an international market, when you not support the languages (and also dont support a full translatable interface or/and problems on the languagesystem like [url=", [url=", ...).

Dont misunderstood me, i like IPS software and i have a lot of licences - but the "International Support" from IPS is very poor - and they would not do anything to make a good job on the international markets.

Because honestly, Mark... Its not a big Problem to become a (international) Staff Member who can speak more than one language... vB and a lot of other companys can do that - IPS can do that - WHEN YOU WOULD DO THAT!!! So please dont say you cant... YOU CAN!

[Michael]

Because honestly, Mark... Its not a big Problem to become a (international) Staff Member who can speak more than one language... vB and a lot of other companys can do that - IPS can do that - WHEN YOU WOULD DO THAT!!! So please dont say you cant... YOU CAN!

Do you want IPS to find one staff member for each language, or one staff member who knows 50 or so other languages to do all of the translations? There aren't that many individuals in the world who could do translations of all of the languages people would want, and to have one new staff member for each language would mean IPS would need to hire on dozens of new staff members. Adding that many more staff means they all have to be paid, which probably means increased product costs. I don't personally want to see this product cost more just because someone wants it translated to a language I don't speak.

I get where you're coming from, it would be great if the product had lots of language packs available officially with it, but just saying "hire staff to do this" isn't a good solution.

[AndyF]

I'd agree in that it would cost money to hire translators to create official packs and then these may have to be updated to incorporate new language strings if these change between versions too. It's not something you can just use a translation tool to 'guess' as although it might be vaguely right, it would be far from perfect, it really needs to be done by someone relatively fluent in that language.

There is a reasonable selection of language packs available in the Resources section, although I do sympathise with those who do not have one available for a language of their choice.

Having said that, language packs are not difficult to create (only time consuming) for those who do speak other languages so it is partly in the communities hands to create these. I do know if I could speak another language I would of already had a pack available for it on here for others to use...

[Mikhail]

language packs are not difficult to create (only time consuming) for those who do speak other languages so it is partly in the communities hands to create these. I do know if I could speak another language I would of already had a pack available for it on here for others to use...

Easier to say, than do. IPB is not friendly at all to any other languages than English. It appeared to be hard work.

[Michael]

If you have any ideas on how to make IP.Board more friendly to non-English folks, please share them. It's not like IPS doesn't want to make their product better, if they know what people struggle with then they can work to fix those issues.

[Mikhail]

If you have any ideas on how to make IP.Board more friendly to non-English folks, please share them. It's not like IPS doesn't want to make their product better, if they know what people struggle with then they can work to fix those issues.

Michael, please refer to my post #6 above, to list of notes here and try starting from responding to these:
- http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/309498-how-to-translate-admin-left-hand-menu/page__p__1945169__hl__admin+panel+translation__fromsearch__1#entry1945169
-
-

What is the other way to work with you guys? No one did even care to respond to me since 29th of July. I don't see any sense in continuing contibuting.

[IPBSupport.de]

If you have any ideas on how to make IP.Board more friendly to non-English folks, please share them. It's not like IPS doesn't want to make their product better, if they know what people struggle with then they can work to fix those issues.

There are tons of Topics (and Problems) in the feedback forums and almost no reaction from IPS.

I know about sooooooo many problems, like...

• ACP not fully translatable
• Helpfiles not translatable
• a lot of stuff not translatable (Board Guidelines, Registration Terms & Rules, Login Page Information, Registration Form Inforegister informations / all informations which saved per ACP that should provide within a languagepack to the customers / downloaders)
• problems with im/export of application languagepacks (overwrites ALL languagepacks, ...)
• languagepacks are for many hosts to big to import...
• and, and, and...

And all of that posted on the feedback forum (e.g. [url="). And whats the reaction from IPS? Nothing...Then IPS do not be surprised, if (new) Customers think, that IPS would not have international (new) Customers. That all is not a good "support" for international markets and you cant become a big international customer base with those problems.

[Mikhail]

That all is not a good "support" for international markets and you cant become a big international customer base with those problems.

They still have their sales who tell people that they do have translations, and one can't check while have not pay for access to the download area ;)

[AndyF]

• problems with im/export of application languagepacks (overwrites ALL languagepacks, ...)
• languagepacks are for many hosts to big to import...
• and, and, and...

Regarding overwritten languages: A separate file such as members_language_pack.xml.gz will overwrite the default. However a fully built package (which is the ideal way authors should produce them, at least in my opinion) such as language.xml.gz should not overwrite the default.

I have seen a few cases where the default has been overwritten, and have written this to assist those who wish to revert it back to default.

Of course, submitting a ticket is also an option. But the way I understand it (and some testing while writing that article to assist others), if you use a complete package you will not overwrite the default.


Regarding hosting limitations: This will be down to the host of course. I'm not quite sure what limitations you are exceeding though :unsure: , if you have less than 2mb available for upload_max_filesize and memory_limit set to lower than 128mb, its possible you could run into problems, the memory_limit being the most likely cause I would guess (although 128mb is the default for php5.2 and is recommended anyway on the installer / upgrader)

They still have their sales who tell people that they do have translations, and one can't check while have not pay for access to the download area ;)

To be fair, even guests can browse the downloads section (just not download) so they can determine for themselves the availability of said language packs. :)

[IPBSupport.de]

Regarding overwritten languages: A separate file such as members_language_pack.xml.gz will overwrite the default. However a fully built package (which is the ideal way authors should produce them, at least in my opinion) such as language.xml.gz should not overwrite the default.

I have seen a few cases where the default has been overwritten, and have written this to assist those who wish to revert it back to default.

Of course, submitting a ticket is also an option. But the way I understand it (and some testing while writing that article to assist others), if you use a complete package you will not overwrite the default.

Its not so easy. When you install a languagepack and update it later (install/overwrite again) you overwrite ALL languagepacks (ALL!!! translated entrys in ALL installed languagepacks).

When you have more than one languagepack (maybe EN, DE, FR or just EN, DE with custome work) you have a big problem...

Regarding hosting limitations: This will be down to the host of course. I'm not quite sure what limitations you are exceeding though :unsure: , if you have less than 2mb available for upload_max_filesize and memory_limit set to lower than 128mb, its possible you could run into problems, the memory_limit being the most likely cause I would guess (although 128mb is the default for php5.2 and is recommended anyway on the installer / upgrader)

Recommed, yes. But thats not realistic - most webhoster dont give you 128mb, max 64mb, mostly 32mb. Yes, its a problem @webhost, but as a company like IPS you cant ignore that and just say "recommed is 128mb" when the most webhost does not give you 128mb.


The most problem is, people from USA/GB look not so closely to our problems or still ignore the problems - as IPS like years (e.g. the translatable ACP is a problem since IPB 1 and announced for 2.x, 3.x and now we still dont have a FULL translatable ACP, because IPS make a big mistake on development and put the most important sections (e.g. all navigations) to XML files).

[LegionWM]

Roger that. GoDaddy defaults at 32MB and you have to pay $$ for a dedicated server if you want more. Not sure how big the forum can really get when we're limited that small.

[Michael]

It is not IPS that recommends 128M, it is PHP's recommendation. Hosts that run PHP should be held accountable for not running it the way it is designed.