BlenderNation Localized Pilot – First Steps

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afbeelding-1.pngI recently spotted an incoming link from the Chinese BlenderCN.org website. It turned out this site has quite a few translated BlenderNation articles, and I quite enjoyed browsing through it. Doing so re-kindled my idea for setting up translated subsites of BlenderNation.

As I was working on my new house over the last few weeks I had quite some time to think about how to set this up so that the solution would be easy to maintain and expand. I think I’ve found a good solution and I’ll be testing it out over the next few weeks. I’d like to set up a pilot with the Chinese community, so if you’re the translator of the articles above, please get in touch!

Do you know of any other sites that translate our news?

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    • ccherrett

      Why not set up this site to use internationization and have different members interpret articles. You could then just have the flags of the countries in the top corner and clicking on them would instantly change the whole site to use that language. It would be a lot of work to set up but when done it should be easy to maintain. Then it could all run as one site with many languages.

    • http://www.blendercn.com Fox

      We are the interprets. We set up this web to let blender know widly in china. It really has a great help for the one who knows only chinese, and interested in Blender.
      We are also interested in your idea, and need more details about your idea.
      Contact us , please.

    • http://vgspectra.net SeohirothTBM

      I agree with ccherrett maybe culd be various flags under each article indicates the aviable languages for the article, I would like to participate on it (Spanish translation)

    • Auria

      Hey if that ever comes to life i would like to help translating to french. i can’t promise i would do them all but i do have time to invest here.

    • ccherrett

      Depending on what software this forum uses it could be a matter of just defining a new language, copying and pasting the English article with images and formatting and replacing the text with the new language.

    • http://www.cginsomniac.com Brian

      I think the idea is to automate the process. Depending on translators to translate each post is not an easy solution.

    • Auria

      @Brian:
      How do you expect to translate without translators??

    • Tony

      http://www.blender.jp runs BlenderNation translated into Japanese.

    • epat

      @Auria:
      There is in fact, a whole ton of automatic computer translating software so you could use that instead – some sites do… too busy to find an example at the moment though.
      -epat. :)

    • Auria

      @epat : Automatic translation is total crap. Perhaps some commercial tools would do it better than google translation, but i highly doubt blender foundation would pay for that. by the way i think these software assist you in translation to a language you don’t know about, for instance by asking precisions about a word that has multiple meanings, etc. i have yet to see automated translated that gives good results

    • http://home.deds.nl/~mp/ ysvry

      well automatic translation will be getting better and better, isnt it easier to just supply links to good dictionary sites? I’m for keeping english as the web language, I heart the chinese are learning it in masses for the upcoming olympics anyway.

    • http://www.blendernation.com Bart

      We’re using WordPress for this site, which doesn’t support multi-language content. Instead, I’ll set up multiple sub-sites, each with their own team of editors. They are free to translate any BN.com main content, or to add their own. I don’t think automatic translation is good enough yet to produce readable material, so I’d rather rely on real people to do the job.

    • aws357

      Finding french translators shoud be easy. Ask the BlenderClan or similar sites :)

      A dutch translation shouldn’t be problematic * wink *

      Don’t know for the other european countries.

      Should we expect a http://www.blendernation.com/fr/nl/cn/es/it soon?

    • ccherrett

      Hey Bart,

      I believe that it is capable of i18n/internationalization. Most content management, e-commerce, etc… are these days.

      http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Localization

    • http://mpan3.homeip.net/ mike

      Machine translation will never be nearly as good as real-human translation in the next few years, especially for very niche talks such as computer graphics. Imagine bablefish trying to decode the meaning of SSS, AA, HDRI, AO and NURBS.

    • http://www.blendernation.com Bart

      @ccherrett: true, but that’s still not what we need. WordPress can display in one language at a time; the localization takes care of the backend interface, the theme coding does the rest. What we’d need is multi-language support and it’s simply not there. Trust me :)

    • Zxayant

      Goed idee! Dan kunnen we ook eens in onze eigen taal reageren op de artikelen. :) Ik mis echt een Nederlandstalig Blenderforum :(.

      “Good idea! Then we can react to the articles in our own language! :). I really miss a Dutch Blenderforum :(“

    • Markus

      I don’t think this is such a good idea, the blender community is not so big (yet) to support so many different sides. But I like a blendernation.com approach better than hundreds of independent sites nobody can find. I think part of the information will be lost in the local community’s and not available to the rest of the global community. But I also understand that not everybody knows English or has intention to learn English. On a second thought it is probably not so concerning after all ;-)

      Markus

    • http://www.blendernation.com Bart

      @ccherrett: ah! Sorry, I’m a bit slow :) WordPress DOES support gettext (L10n). I was already coding something like that myself, but this looks like it’ll be a better solution. Thanks!

    • http://blender.forumm.biz TheSultan

      This forum is in Turkish, and in its News (Haberler) forum, it translates Blendernation news and publish it in Turkish for the Turkish Blender Users. Also, it has tutorials in Turkish (all of them are translated from the other web sites in English (like BlenderWiki))

    • http://blog.blendercn.org Fox

      We’re back! :P

      After a 3-years-long time, we’re back for translating BN / GURU / Cookies and Durian.
      Although we’re working on it and don’t know how long will we stick to it. But the key is keep translating and posting everyday as Bart, isn’t it?

      Bart, I miss you too.