Experiences with translation needed (how long does it take?)

[elbaek]

Hi everyone,

We have some journals in Danish on our site Ejournals@cbs therefore I am looking into translating OJS into Danish. As I do not have the time myself to do it nor the skills I want to hire a professional translator to do it. For the translation I will apply for a grant, but to apply for the grant I need to know approx. how long it takes to translate OJS from English into another language.

So basically what I would like know from any of you out there who have translated OJS into other languages – how long did it take? Hours, days, weeks, one person, more people?

Thanks for sharing your experience with me
Mikael K. Elbæk
Ejournals@cbs
Copenhagen Business School Library

[asmecher]

Hi Mikael,

One translator provided the following estimate:

• Main locale file: approx. 3 days
• Emails: 2 days or less
• Documentation: 2 days or less
• Help files: approx. 5 days

In our experience, the time taken and quality of the resulting translation depend heavily on the translator's familiarity with journal terminology; translators who weren't familiar with XML sometimes had trouble with character encodings.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Open Journal Systems Team

[MMeijer]

Hi Alec,
We are currently evaluating OJS and thinking about a Dutch translation.
Thanks for the estimates mentioned above.

Do you have, or plan for, a procedure to upgrade translations when OJS itself is upgraded?

Regards,
Maarten

[asmecher]

Hi Maarten,

The next release will include some translation maintenance tools to help ease the process of updating a translation between releases of OJS; this tool will also probably be useful for creating translations in the first place. The tool is complete, but keep in mind that it's unreleased and still needs testing. If you'd like, contact me via email and I can provide you with a URL to evaluate.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Open Journal Systems Team