Translation

Doing secure offline machine translation with macOS

Machine translation has come a long way since researchers figured out that it was better to translate phrases than individual words. It works best when there are many texts in the source and destination languages. So if you’re translating to and from languages that both have a small number of digitized texts, it’s likely that translation will use English as a middle step. In this case, the accuracy of the translation can be affected. And I wouldn’t trust even the best machine translation without some level of review. In my case, I use DeepL in conjunction with LanguageTool (see the links at the bottom of the page).

Which natural languages should you support?

I have long been an advocate for localization (even if I am somewhat behind with translating the older content on this site into French). It’s a fair assumption that, most of the time, readers would prefer to access content in their own language. But you have limited resources, so which natural (not computer) languages should you support?

My translation workflow

Last week, I wrote about how I added localization to my website. While I’ve translated all the core content, I still have a backlog of more than a year’s worth of articles to translate. So I’ve come up with a workflow to make the process easier. My aim is to simultaneously publish all future articles in English and French, and get to the backlog as time allows. I’m not fluent in French, but I’m trying to get better, and doing this is going to mean I’m exposed to the language on a weekly basis. The approach I take should work equally well for any other language that you have some familiarity with, even if you’re not a native speaker.

Adding languages to a Hugo site

I’m a long-term advocate for localization, but this site has been monolingual for over a year now. It’s past time I started following my own advice. So last weekend I finally got around to localizing the site for French.

Creating documentation in XML

If your documentation has reached the limits of what’s possible in Markdown, and you’d prefer not to fall back to HTML, it’s time to consider authoring in XML. And no, I don’t mean using Microsoft Word and saving in .DOCX format. Whichever schema you choose (DITA, DocBook, XHTML or something else), you’ll get the benefits of single sourcing and structured authoring, which will save you time and money, especially if your documentation is translated into other languages.

How to offend most of your international users all at once

We love icons. They’re a great way to convey information simply, even if many of them are skeuomorphs from a bygone age. You know, like using a floppy disk ( 💾 ) to mean save; a telephone receiver ( 📞 ) for voice calls; an envelope ( ✉️ ) for email; a single lens reflex camera ( 📷 ) for taking a picture; a movie camera ( 🎥 ) for video; a folder ( 📁 ) for file containers; a calendar ( 📅 ) for dates; a newspaper ( 📰 ) for news feeds; a spiral notepad ( 🗒️ ) for text editors; an alarm clock ( ⏰ ) for alerts; a stopwatch ( ⏱️ ) for timers; a bed ( 🛏️ ) for sleep; a book ( 📖 ) for electronic publications; and so on. And I took most of those examples from the current version of iOS nearly a decade after Apple supposedly abandoned skeuomorphism. But we keep on using them because they are unambiguous, with a one-to-one meaning. Unlike say, flags.

Converting JSON string collections to binary assets for non-UTF-8 compliant devices

Last time I wrote about localization with Weblate. This week, I’ll show how the SE Basic IV project takes JSON output from Weblate and converts it into binaries that can be used with 8-bit code pages by the interpreter. This is a very niche use case, but hopefully there are some general lessons that you can apply to your own projects.

Doing continuous translation with Weblate

This week, I want to give a shout-out to Weblate, a web-based translation tool with Git integration that’s available free to open source projects. I discovered it by chance because a developer I was chatting with on Telegram had contributed to a project that made use of it.

Writing for a global audience

At the end of last week, I attended a conference in Budapest. I had the opportunity to give a short talk on API First, and I’ll expand on that in a future article. But one of the biggest takeaways for me was that, as an industry, we still have a long way to go in making documentation globally accessible.