I was asked to translate an entire web site...

[TheNiceGuy]

Hi guys
I've been approached by a company that wants me to translate their Japanese site to English. They handle all the IT end of it, I just need to email them the translations. It's roughly 100 pages, and I'm working through the best way to do this.
Was thinking of just copy and paste each page as a word document and dividing it in chunks with the English translation after the original Japanese. Formatting looks a bit rough, as word squishes the copy around to fit the page. Mainly just want it quick and easy to format and work with, and for them to accurately know where to put what on their website.
Not sure if there's an easier way to do it.

 

[IronWing]

Just off the top of my head I wonder if you can take their pages into a text editor that handles both Japanese and latin characters and set up CSS <div> or <span> blocks next to each block of Japanese text and put the translations in the blocks. This would tie each translation to the specific part of the page where it came from. The display attribute for the <div> or <span> blocks can be toggled to turn the english translations on/off in the page header.

 

[ninaholic37]

Hi! If you're really bored, would you be able to translate this song to english for me? I have the jist of it, but not really. I have some money just sitting in my Paypal account, make me an offer :biggrin:

 

[Blitzvogel]

Hi! If you're really bored, would you be able to translate this song to english for me? I have the jist of it, but not really. I have some money just sitting in my Paypal account, make me an offer :biggrin:

I'd hate to think what they might serve for meals there......

:hmm:

 

[TheNiceGuy]

Not sure.
By the way, is there a way to count how many characters are on an entire website?

 

[Red Squirrel]

I would suggest to them that they make a "language file" otherwise they're putting a lot of work on themselves and the translators(s) if they plan to support multiple languages.

If they're dead set on hard coding it what I would do is open the pages with a text editor and do it in place.

 

[TheNiceGuy]

Hi! If you're really bored, would you be able to translate this song to english for me? I have the jist of it, but not really. I have some money just sitting in my Paypal account, make me an offer :biggrin:

I'll translate it for free for you when I get time, but this is a rush job and I got to get on it right away it's gonna take up all my free time.

 

[TheNiceGuy]

I would suggest to them that they make a "language file" otherwise they're putting a lot of work on themselves and the translators(s) if they plan to support multiple languages.

If they're dead set on hard coding it what I would do is open the pages with a text editor and do it in place.

Sorry, I've got no idea about the technical end of it. They're software and web developers, so I'm sure they have their own way of doing things.

At this point, we are just going to copy and paste the parts that need translating from the website into a word document.
Then I'll translate it into English, one page at a time, alternating between Japanese and English.
We are just working on a quote right now. I think it will work best to charge roughly per character, and that's going to require manually selecting the parts that need to be translated anyways. There's a lot of other content on the site, such as advertising, that doesn't need to be translated, as well as dead space that makes per page quotes difficult.
We don't normally do this sort of translation, so it's new and we're kind of feeling our way through as we go.

 

[TheNiceGuy]

Been messing with it a bit, and a large 2-column doc that could run the two translations side by side without squishing the original site page layout would work.
Can Word do this?

 

[TheNiceGuy]

I would suggest to them that they make a "language file" otherwise they're putting a lot of work on themselves and the translators(s) if they plan to support multiple languages.

If they're dead set on hard coding it what I would do is open the pages with a text editor and do it in place.

What's a "language file"?

 

[Jawadali]

Been messing with it a bit, and a large 2-column doc that could run the two translations side by side without squishing the original site page layout would work.
Can Word do this?

If you are going the Microsoft Word route, it may be beneficial to spend a little bit of time using Microsoft OneNote to see if you can make this easier for yourself.

OneNote should be more flexible with the formatting and the organization.

It'd be best if your customer has OneNote installed as well in order to facilitate sharing.

Of course, if there is a better/"proper"/sustainable way to do a website translation (as some other folks have alluded to), I would try to do a bit of investigation into those as well. It's not an area I am familiar with.