Better WordPress translation with memoQ

Translating websites is mostly a royal pain in the tush. And I avoid it most of the time. Why? Several reasons.

• Those who request website translations often have no idea what platform is used nor do they really know how much content is present.
• They have very little understanding of the technical details or importance of translatable information hidden in tag attributes, selection lists, etc. and so there are often misunderstandings about the true volume to be translated.
• There are a lot of sloppy cowboys slogging through the bog, glibly bidding low rates to translate sites they neither understand nor truly care about, and their victims... uh, prospects, customers, whatever... usually lack the expertise or the patience to understand the difference between a wild-ass lowball guess from someone lacking the skills and tools to do the job right and a carefully researched, reasonably accurate estimate of time and effort from a professional.

Shopping for "quotes" when neither you nor the one submitting a "bid" actually understand the technical basis of the project is a process with no guarantee of a satisfactory outcome. And too often this process turns out badly.

These days, many small companies use the popular content management system WordPress to manage their web sites. It may not be the best by some technical standards, but sometimes it is better to define "best" according to the likelihood of finding someone to provide services involving a platform and of there being such experts available not only now but for a reasonable amount of time in the future. I think it is fair to say that WordPress has met that standard for some time and will probably do so for some time more.

I have had a good number of requests for translating WordPress content in the past, but none of the estimates given were accepted, because typically the content to be translated was an order of magnitude greater than the client realized or nobody could commit to a clear decision on what parts were to be translated and what parts were unimportant. And then we have the problem that many sites use themes which are poorly designed as multilingual structures.

The WordPress Multilingual Plug-in (WPML) makes sensible, professional management of websites with content in more than one language much easier. When I learned about this technology more than a year ago, I suggested its use to the person who requested a quotation for translation services, but that suggestion is probably still echoing somewhere out there in the Void.

At memoQ Fest 2018 this year in Budapest, I had the pleasure to attend a superb presentation by Stefan Weimar on how to cope with the translation of Wordpress sites and some of what you need to know to use the WPML technology right. I was inspired and hoped to have an opportunity to look at things more closely some day.

That day turned out to be a week later. Funny how that goes.

Three or four years ago I translated a small web site for a friend's company. At the time, the site used the Typo3 content management system, which proved to be troublesome. Not so much because of the technology, but because of the service provider using it, who rejected any suggestions for providing the content to be translated in a form that would not require his manual intervention at the text level. He copied, pasted and improved (German: verschlimmbesserte) my translation as only a German with full confidence in his grade school English skills could. It was... not what anyone had hoped for, and I never  found the heart to mention all the mistakes in the final result.

So now, when someone asked me to have a look at their new site, I felt a bit queasy. Nunca mais, I thought. No way, José. Or Wolfgang as it were. But in the meantime, unbeknownst to me, he had switched service providers and CMS platforms, and the new provider managing his web content is a professional with a professional understanding of sites for international clients in many languages. And he uses WPML. The right way!

So now it was up to me to figure out what's what in memoQ. So first I used the memoQ XLIFF filter on all the little XLIFFs supported by the plug-in. I quickly saw that a few other things were needed, like a cascaded HTML filter...

Somewhat messy, but doable once the HTML tags get properly protected by a chained filter.

Then I tried again, this time applying memoQ's WordPress (WPML) filter. And this was the result:

That was easy. Hmm. I think I know which method I prefer.

So for translations of WordPress websites properly configured to use WPML technology, the new memoQ filter looks like a winner!

Choosing a blog software platform

Since starting my translation blog in late 2008, I've launched two others reflecting my personal interests with dogs and the experience of hunting in Germany. I don't update the others nearly as often as I could or probably should, because I need to reserve a little of my non-working time for eating and sleeping. But these other blogs have been very useful for gathering personal experience in how to work with certain blog software and what to avoid.

Having worked with other types of content management systems in the past, I find that blogging tools are relatively easy to master and offer a better alternative to most static HTML-based sites. Informal tests I have conducted show that content posted in a blog environment is indexed better and faster than on sites with older designs. This means that CVs, descriptions of services offered, etc. will probably get viewed more often by potential customers and business partners. The wealth of widgets and plug-ins available for different platforms also offer a lot of flexibility for customization and experimentation.

One thing I've learned is that some mechanism for filtering comment spam is critical. There are many different mechanisms practiced for comment vetting; on a number of translators' blogs the practice seems to be "once approve, always passed through". Others (like me) check every comment, though if I do find a "white list" function somewhere in the tools for this blog, I'll certainly add most of the regular respondents for administrative convenience. What I do try to keep out are spurious comments or self-serving links that add nothing useful to a discussion. On the one blog I operate without comment spam filtering, I get dozens of trash messages each day like the one show here. The purpose is to add a link to a scam site for gambling, drugs or other undesirable things. I don't see that on my translation blog - Google's Blogger environment filters garbage like that out quite effectively - nor do I see it on my dog blog, because the filter plug-in I use has been very effective.

My time to deal with technical troubles outside my main revenue-generating activity (translation) is very limited, so I appreciate the convenience of the hosted solutions. As far as I know, I don't have the full control over every aspect of the format in the same way I do with the two Wordpress blogs hosted on my own domains, but then perhaps I do: I can modify the HTML code of the template here directly if I am inclined to do so. And when I decided to change the URL for the blog to a domain name I owned, it took about ten minutes to arrange the switch; old URLs are forwarded automatically. And dealing with graphics (adding photos, screenshots, etc.) has been generally easier to manage than with the two blogs where I have "more control".

The Google platform I use also appears to have good facilities for creating migratable backups of the templates and content. If I were interested in fooling around with "monetizing" options like AdSense or Amazon, many of these are already integrated in the infrastructure and are simple to implement. That's not something that interests me much, as I lack the time for something that I consider deadly dull, and if I want to generate cash there are more interesting ways to do so. My rare flings with such things are either experiments or a deliberate endorsement of a company whose products I feel are beneficial to translators (like the AIT links currently in the sidebar and at the bottom). Nonetheless, for those with an interest in such things, I think there is less work involved in setup and maintenance if you use someone else's infrastructure to the greatest extent possible.

That feels like a strange recommendation given that I programmed and developed applications on mainframes, desktops and web environments for about 30 years. And I'm sure that a number of people I know and respect will be able to explain very persuasively why I really should tinker with every last bit of the configuration for the blog myself, but they remind me a little of my friends who always called me an idiot for not building my ow PC from individual components. I listened politely to the criticisms, made lame excuses about a lack of time and went back to work on my functioning systems while theirs seemed perpetually out of service due to endless compatibility problems and hardware failures.

I think each of the "canned infrastructure" solutions available for free, such as Google's Blogger, Wordpress (hosted) and TypePad have particular advantages that may fit an individual language service provider's needs better or worse. It's worth experimenting with several briefly to see what feels right, though I have no hesitation in recommending the solution I use for this blog as a simple, effective communication platform. It's far from perfect, but it's good enough, and I don't have time for more.

Dogs in Translation

As some of you may have noticed, dogs play a pretty big role in my daily routine. When I'm not translating stacks of technical documentation, patents, etc. I'm often off in the woods with my dog doing tracking exercises, watching him play with other dogs or running off to a training session. It's a fairly international preoccupation too, as we try to glean the information we need from sources in many countries around the world. For the past week we've been in Denmark for a breeding appointment set up by a Dutch enthusiast, next week I hope to visit a Hungarian kennel after the MemoQ Fest is over and much of the week I've been trying to digest training literature and information in five languages (which gives me indigestion, as I've only mastered two of them).

As a way of keeping track of all the useful multilingual and international information we've been gathering for our hunting dogs, my partner and I have launched another blog focusing on our dog-related activities. It uses Wordpress, so this is also a good excuse for me to practice with that tool for a possible migration of this blog in the future or the launching of a possible German translation blog later this year. A few months ago I set up an account in Germany with the provider ALL-INKL.COM after it was recommended by some BDÜ colleagues. I have been using a domain there to test a new template for a relaunch of our business site, and I have been very pleased with the service. Today I was even more pleased when the new domain for the dog blog was up and running in less than ten minutes. I was quite shocked at how efficiently everything worked. And the Wordpress software is so straightforward that I don't think I'll have to provide much technical support to my other half for administration, which pleases me enormously.

In any case, I am very grateful to those who recommended ALL-INKL.COM. I really couldn't ask for better hosting service, and I gladly endorse it for anyone in Germany who is looking for a good place to host a business or personal web site.