Does Dozuki support multiple languages?
I was wondering if Dozuki can support multiple languages out of the box?
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Hi Mark,
Dozuki has made a lot of progress on internationalization of our platform, and this has included translating to Dozuki into quite a few languages.
Currently Dozuki has been fully translated into eight languages:
Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.
Machine translation is available for 80 other languages.
Dozuki supports the use of all UTF-8 characters.
To check on the status of how translated a language is for Dozuki, visit http://translate.ifixit.com/.
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OK. This is important to us. I think there are some other issues with the business model of Dozuki but the product is very good.
Thanks! Mark, feel free to email me directly with any other concerns you have about our business model. We're eager for feedback. My address is kyle at ifixit.
Well let's put it simple multi-language support is a must for what you are doing.
A localized interface does not do the trick here, as the first thing you would do is to try to write in your native language (be it Italian, German, Estonian or whatever).
The next thing for any semi-international business would be to translate the content to English or other required languages. Hence introducing a localized UI without mulit-language support is rather pointless. Where do I put my localized content? How do I manage it within dozuki? The ability to publish into multiple media is pointless if I can only do so for one language.
No, google-translate isn't even good enough for basic translations. How can you think that it's good enough for technical instructions? This is just the usual bias of a US company. There are roughly 380 million native English speakers in the world, but there are still some 6.631 billion people left in the world that use other languages.
No offense but with all your knowledge about user experience, I'd think you'd put more emphasis on internationalization, especially in the field of "help, technical documentation, a.s.o.".
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I completely agree that full multi-language support is needed. We're working hard toward that, and we architected the backend of Dozuki from day 1 to support it. It's more difficult for us than for many document management systems because our data structure is so much more complex.
That's not an excuse, just an explanation for why we haven't implemented it yet. I'm not saying single language localisation or machine translation is ideal, and I understand that it won't be good enough for many companies. But they're forward progress in the right direction. We care a lot about internationalization—and we're going to invest the time and resources to get it right.
Any progress on this?
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We've made quite a bit of progress. We finished Steps 1 and 2 that Kyle outlined above. We're almost done with a multi-month project to enable human-translated versions of the same wiki page. As soon as this stage of the project is deployed, we'll start working on our (hopefully) final phase of the project: supporting human-translated versions of guides. There's lots of details we can share about the process, and we're still very actively looking for feedback. If you're willing to talk about your requirements, we'd love to hear from you.
I totally second Norbert's answer.
1. Allowing your customers to localize their content should come first. This will add immediate value to your current market base and you will learn how to handle i18n issues in the process. Localizing the UI has little value if your clients are unable to display properly their content in their own language.
2. Providing Machine Translation out of the box is simply a terrible idea. We are not only talking of poor grammar here, mistakes or errors in translation can result in loss sales and legal problems. MT is a process. To give acceptable results the MT engine must first be fed with content specific to the domain and then be trained with iterative round of reviews (post editing) by human translators. Needless to say this is not provided with free online translation services, and that it requires a certain size and budget to be a viable option at all.
Rather, I suggest you focus on a UI and workflows that make it simple to manage multilingual content, and to export/import translation. Take a look at the wcms Ektron or Drupal or the DMS Alfresco for examples of implementations.
For the export/import, use industry standard formats such as xllff, and provide an API, or allow plug-ins to be designed, to interface with the Translation Management System of the language service vendors out there.
Hervé Thevenet
Co-founder HT Localization
Translation & Localization Service Provider
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I had hoped that Dozuki supports multiple languages, unfortunately without multi-lingual support we have to look at other options.
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