I’m considering building a site that features the games my wife adapted for her equine therapy sessions.
The initial site will be in (American) English. However, Equine Therapy Centers exist throughout the world. So I’m going to add an option for volunteers to translate one or more of the games into a different language.
Assuming I get such volunteers, I anticipate a number of issues. Among them –
– The games available will vary by language as I cannot expect a volunteer to translate all games listed on the American site. How would you handle the menu column listing (that occupies the left column of a three column page)? That is, would you ask the volunteer to translate all the game names for future reference, or just the games the volunteer translates?
— Similarly, some games are local (e.g. a game that matches US state names to their state outline).
– I need to have a way to check the accuracy of the translation. Would you have another vounteer translate the converted verbiage back into English?
— Similarly, once written, the game descriptions are unlikely to change. However, I will probably allow visitors to enter comments through a form. If a translating volunteer for that language is not available, would you remove the comment form or take a chance?
– I may create a form allowing the visitor to submit new games (to be reviewed before publication of course). Would you insist that any new game candidates be submitted in English?
– Should each page ribbon have a tab for each language a translation exists (for that page)? If so, is there an issue for defining the unicode set for the page? (Or can I set an exception Unicode by a CSS class?)
What other issues do you see that need to be addressed?
The site you’re describing sounds very much like how Wikipedia works; you could probably draw a lot of inspiration of how they built it.
I would personally only show the games that are translated. I always find it very annoying to click on a link and get message like “Sorry, we’re working on this, please come back later”
I’d say volunteers can either adapt the game to their own country/region, use the US version (which probably a lot harder for them than it is for US people), or not translate it at all.
No, I think would ask one or two other volunteers to compare the translation to the English version, and correct any mistakes.
I think I’d leave the form there and translate any comments via Google Translate to check if the comment is relevant for that page (i.e., make sure it’s not spam).
No, if they have a game that is specific for their country (see question 2, but the other way around), I’d let them submit that.
That’s probably a good idea, yes.
I don’t understand the question. Can’t you just make the whole site in UTF-8?
Beside translating the games, you probably need other texts translated as well, like a home page, contact page, stuff like that. You need to think about who should translate those.
Other than that I think you pretty much covered it.