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Best way to translate an app?
I have a (proprietary) app that I'd like to translate to other languages, to better target other locales and regions.
Personally, I wouldn't trust Google or similar automated translators for the job. Since I only speak English, I don't have a way to verify whether the translations are correct and make sense in its context.
I've been considering translation services from Fiverr, but I've never used any services from them and it, too, has the same problem — I have no way to verify whether the translation is okay.
Has anyone translated their app/website into a different language? What's the approach that you used?
Comments
OCR reader with permission to float over other apps.
DeepL translations on paid plans are pretty solid if its manga or webnovels between chinese/korea/japanese and english
Sorry, I don't understand what you mean. However, I'm looking to translate my own app for which I have the source code; I only mentioned "proprietary" in passing because this isn't a OSS project where I can rely on user contributions.
Ahh, so you have source files in written text. What is the source language?
English.
What you want to translate it to?
Multiple languages. Japanese, Korean, German, Portuguese and Spanish; at least initially.
Keep the language file portion of the app "open", as in, a text file in the installation folder.
Let users contribute their translations via community forum.
Contributors get free license for a period of time.
If you have a good community of a versatile linguistic users, you can try Weblate https://weblate.org/en/
Using weblate you can crowdsource translations and track progress.
For the translation part, maybe unbabel.com or similar.
The quality of services from Fiverr is often very low.
You will most likely get a better result if you use a translation service from a country with low salaries.
Prices are low in Bulgaria, and the quality of translation services is generally high. They are often done by native-speaking translators that live in Bulgaria.
I have good experience with prevodi.bg (DK/EN to BG) but I think they mostly do translations to and from Bulgarian. An alternative is valmon.bg.
You can go and hire approved translators, the kind that is hired by german courts. They get paid 1,80-2€/normed line, which is defined as line of text with up to 55 symbols, including spaces.
https://www.justiz-dolmetscher.de/Recherche/en/
Let users contribute their translations via community forum.
Contributors get free license for a period of time.
this is the best approach imho.
If your website is a free service or you don't have much money to invest, fiverr is your best bet.
Transactions should be placed in separate files in key value pairs. Then you can share the file with multiple translators at the same time. You can look at frameworks like Laravel as an example
How much total English (i.e., number words) is there?
If you're just translating menus and such, here is an idea I'm pulling out of thin air.
I assume you're using some industry standard to manage i18n. In my limited experience with that, all strings end up segregated with pointers from code. If your program is doing typical things, you perhaps could cut time by borrowing language files/pices from appropriately licensed code (i.e., BSD/MIT, not GPL) using the same i18n-handling technology.
So if you need "Open File" translated into German, find a few BSD-licensed projects and extract that translation from their i18n. Use more than 1 and compare.
Of course, give credit, comply with licenses, and obviously GPL won't work in this case.
Disclaimer: I have no idea if this is practical.
I see a couple of projects in https://crowdin.com/projects#showcases that is proprietary, people are willing to translate to their native languages if you give them free license and credits.
You can simply add an in-app translator like RaspController (available on Google Play).
Using fiverr is ok, but you should do a small test to find the person you need. Contact the translator and ask them for a single sentence translation (which you think is probably the hardest to translate). Then post the original sentence and its translation in language related communities like stackexchange to see if it fits.
If the amount of text that needs to be translated is a lot then you can repeat the same test for like every 5-10$ you spend on fiverr.
User volunteers. You simply send your template with English words/phrases and they just put the translation next to it.
Having your user QA helps ensure proper context and visual stuff like word wrapping or accents or something that isn't noticed with smaller words or without special characters, etc gets reported and fixed.
+1 on DeepL, with a solid api ...
Once you have acquired these members, you will have the budget for improvements.
>
What are you using it for yourself? :P
I am French, not very good with foreign languages, I have been using it for two years, both for a web service and for myself...
The free version will allow you to test the quality of the translation ... The access to the api is not very expensive ...
To my knowledge, this is the best automatic translator available today ...
我是法国人，对外语不是很在行，我已经用了两年了，既为一个网络服务，也为自己 ...
免费版将允许你测试翻译的质量。访问api的费用不是很高......
据我所知，它是当今最好的自动翻译机。
Sou francês, não sou muito bom com línguas estrangeiras, uso-o há dois anos, tanto para um serviço web como para mim mesmo ...
A versão gratuita permitirá que você teste a qualidade da tradução ... O acesso à api não é muito caro ...
Pelo que sei, é o melhor tradutor automático disponível hoje ...
Я француз, не очень хорошо знаю иностранные языки, я использую его в течение двух лет, как для веб-сервиса, так и для себя ...
Бесплатная версия позволит вам проверить качество перевода ... Доступ к api стоит не очень дорого ...
Насколько мне известно, это лучший автоматический переводчик на сегодняшний день ...