Ideas for language translation

[mreider]

Hi there.

I built an online course management tool called wordcircle. You can check it out / download source code at http://wordcircle.org (note to code snoopers - source will not seem logical / readable until v.3)

Anyhow - I have people lined up to give me translation text in Fench, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Italian and Dutch.

I was thinking of doing something like this:

[FONT=times new roman]

class translator {

function transPhrase($language,$code){

 $phrase['en']['greeting'] = "hello";
 $phrase['fr']['greeting'] = "bonjour";
 $phrase['sp']['greeting'] = "hola";

 $phrase['en']['question'] = "the sky is blue";
 $phrase['fr']['question'] = "le ciel est bleu";
 $phrase['sp']['question'] = "el cielo es azul";

 //etc...

 return $phrase[$language][$code];

}

}
[/FONT]

Then I could do this:

[FONT=times new roman]
if(isset($REQUEST['lang'])){
$language = $REQUEST['lang'];
}else{
$language = 'en'; //default is English
}
echo($translator->transPhrase($language,"question"));
[/FONT]

I could do the above, or something like it - but this is not my question (unless you have comments about the technique). My question is this... I am going to hand a list of phrases to seven different people. The Spanish speaker will get his list, the French speaker will get her list etc. The lists will look like this:

[FONT=courier new]Dear Friend, Thanks for helping me translate my website. Below you will find a list of phrases, please translate the phrase on the left into your native language - completing the column on the right.

CODE =-== ENGLISH =-=-=-=-=-=- TRANSLATION
Hello -=-==- Hello -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= ____________
Question -= The sky is blue =-=-=-= ___
Dog -=-==- My dog has fleas -=-=-= _____
Truth -=-== Dick Cheney is a crook - ___________

Thanks, please email the finished version back to me by 10:03 tomorrow.
[/FONT]

What I would like is to send this to them in Excel format. Then I want to take the finished / translated Excel spreadsheets and save them as .csv files to load into arrays. There will be seperate files for each languages. Is this sound? Can you feed my laziness by showing me the code you would write to do this? Basically I want function transPhrase to load all of the translated phrases from the spreadsheets so that the codes are all correctly correlated and the function works as written above.

I just want to make this as easy as possible for the people doing the translations as well as for me once they get it all back in my inbox.

Thanks for your advice

-Matt

[Shrike]

We did a project here which was multilingual ( to the tune of 21 languages - eek ) and did it pretty much that way. It was done in ASP.NET, which has a special resource file built in XML, however it worked pretty much like you have suggested. It might be worth moving to XML instead of CSV for speed reasons, if it becomes noticable.

[academy]

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[foid025]

you need it by 10:03?? lol 😉 not 10:04?

no sounds like a pretty sound method to do that, though I agree that xml might well be faster.

[Cent]

Wouldn't it be easier to convert the CSV into the format you need and just have an include file load the right language file? So instead of having a function translate the text you would just use the $language variable be part of the path to the include file such as:

include($language."/text.php");

Seems simpler to have:

echo $phrase['greeting'];

Best,
Cent

[foid025]

i was thinking about your script again, and I thought perhaps your array would be easier to use if it numerically incremented. Instead of having to manually get

$phrase['en']['greeting'] = $row->greetingEn;
$phrase['fr']['greeting'] = $row->greetingFr;
$phrase['sp']['greeting'] = $row->greetingSp;

You coud simply have
for($i=0;$i<$totalPhrases;$i++)
{
$phrase['en'][$i] = $row->Sp[$i];
}

seems quicker...

[Shrike]

Note that this thread is over a year old... 😉