User guide to set up #umbraco translation functionality
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Although I’m living in a quite small country, we do get requests for multilingual sites as we’ve got three official languages Dutch, French and English. Rarely we get a request to demo how the whole translation stuff functions in umbraco. So I did some research and have found some issues which I wasn’t aware of. Small bugs which can be fixed quite easily. Here’s what you should do and be aware of when exploring and using the translation features in umbraco. I’ll be using the CWS2 website as a starter and assuming English is our ‘master’ language, and we’ll be creating a new site within the same umbraco installation which is a Dutch version of the CWS2 site.
Below is the content structure of the CWS2 starter kit website:
First, we need to create a copy of the existing English site. Right-click the ‘Home’ node and select ‘Copy’.
I’ve selected the ‘Content’ node as the root for the new site. Click ‘OK’ when ready. Content tree now has 2 top nodes, the second one will hold the Dutch translation (Also note that the site doesn’t get published yet)
Let’s start by translating the ‘Codegarden 09’ page which can be found under ‘News and Events’ node. But first, we’ll set up some users in the administration site who are responsible for translating pages.
Create a new user in the ‘Users’ section by right-clicking ‘Users’ node and select ‘Create’. In the create dialog, enter the name of the translator.
Don’t forget to enter a valid email address for this user. If you don’t, the translator user won’t get notified of new translation work items (You won’t even know the user didn’t get notified either). I’ve run into this myself… although I’ve received no error when actually assigning a translation work item to a translator. Oh, and whilst we’re here, make sure the user that will be assigning translation task will also need a valid email address. Again, no error messages when you haven’t set it.
Don’t forget to set ‘User type’ to [translator] as well.
Now lt’s assign the translation work item to ‘translator’. Right click the ‘Codegarden 09’ node (for the Dutch site) and select ‘Send to translation’.
If the language dropdown does not yet contain the language you’d like the page to be translated to, go to ‘Settings’ section, right-click ‘Languages’ node and select ‘Create’. Choose the appropriate language from the dropdown.
If all goes well (and remember, you should have email addresses for both sender and receiver), than ‘translator’ will have received a mail asking for translation of the page. Body of the mail says:
Hi translator This is an automated mail to inform you that the document 'Hotelinformatie' has been requested for translation into 'Dutch (Netherlands)' by Administrator. Go to http://domain.com/umbraco/translation/details.aspx?id=1089 to edit. Or log into umbraco to get an overview of your translation tasks http://domain.com/umbraco/umbraco.aspx Have a nice day! Cheers from the umbraco robot
Nice huh? Yes, it is but, there’s a small but… the first link that is provided in the mail is not entirely correct, especially the parameter part is not ok! Bug has been reported and let’s hope that this issue will get resolved as soon as possible in a future release.
Second link http://domain.com/umbraco/umbraco.aspx can be used to login into the administration site, browse to the ‘translation’ section and find all translation task assigned to the translator.
Clicking on your task show the translation task details. Download the xml and start translating. As soon as the translation is finished, upload the translated xml using the upload link.
Done!
An extra thoughts while I was researching the translation features: How do people use the xml for translation? Do you have software utils, which one? If not, what do you use for translation?