By Tony
Patton
Lotus’s
Domino Global Workbench doesn’t replace human translators, but it
makes doing business in a polyglot world a lot easier.
Thanks
to the Web, you no longer have to be a huge multinational
corporation to do business around the globe. Your company Web site
can do everything from providing sales information to taking
customer orders and fielding tech support questions, so practically
any business can call the world its marketplace. But as more
non-English-speaking people are getting online, you won’t be able to
tap fully into this global market unless your Web site can
communicate in more than one language.
To reach potential customers who speak in different tongues,
companies must localize, or translate their Web sites into each
language they want to support. To help them do so, Lotus has
developed software that makes the process of localizing a Web site a
little easier. Bundled with Domino Designer R5, Domino Global
Workbench is a separate application for creating and managing
multilingual Domino Web sites. (Its previous incarnation, Notes
Global Designer, ships with R4.6.)
Workbench doesn’t magically do the actual translation, changing
"click here" to "cliquez ici." Real people must still do that
(although Workbench can work with automated translation technology,
as I’ll discuss later). Instead, Workbench streamlines the process
of localizing the design elements in your site’s user interface,
such as text in buttons, images, and navigation bars. Specifically,
Workbench lists each design element in a glossary and references
them in a separate database. Human translators then manually enter
new text for each element. Workbench uses the translated terms and
referenced elements to create a copy of the site that sports a
localized interface. And finally, humans enter translations of the
remaining content.
In addition to saving you from having to recreate translated
versions of your site’s structure and design elements from scratch,
Workbench includes features that help you manage content across the
multilingual versions of your site. So a change you make to the
English can be more easily propagated across the French, Italian,
and German.
Here’s a look at exactly what Global Workbench does and doesn’t
do.
The
Domino Global Workbench window is the place where you
manage the source, glossary, and tagged databases that
make up a translation project. Here we see the design
elements (the items to be translated) in a source
database called Test Discussion 5, along with a list of
the actions to be performed on
them. | |
A
Step-by-Step Example
Let’s
say you want to localize an English Web site into French, German,
and Italian:
- First, you use the Workbench project manager to set up a new
project for the translation. (If you need to translate more than
one site at a time, you can create other projects, too.) Give this
particular project a name, such as GroupComputing.
- Next, you select the Domino database containing the design
elements to be translated by opening the new project in Workbench
and entering the file name and path to the database. This is known
as the source database.
- You then create a glossary database for the project by going
to the Notes client and using the Global Workbench 5.0 Glossary
template (installed in the client when you install Workbench). At
this point, you also specify the reference language you’re
translating from (in this example, English), and all the languages
you’re translating to (French, German, and Italian).
- If you want to track information and error messages during the
process, you can use another Workbench template installed in the
Notes client to create a Reports database.
- You’re now ready to create a tagged database, which is a copy
of the source database where each translatable element is replaced
by a unique tag. To do this, you return to Workbench, select the
glossary you just created, and enter a file name and path for
where you want the tagged database stored. Workbench creates the
tagged database and lists it in its window. If you want, you can
scan the Reports database at the bottom of the window for any
error messages.
- Next, you must open the glossary database and prepare it for
translation. If there are any design elements you don’t want
translated, select those now. They’re tagged appropriately so
translators know not to waste time on them.
- After marking the glossary, hand it off to your translators,
who manually replace English terms in the glossary with French,
German, and Italian.
- When the glossary is translated, you’re ready to build your
multilingual site. When you do so, you choose whether to create a
separate translated database for each language or combine all
languages in one database (I’ll elaborate on this option in a
moment). After you make your choice, Workbench combines translated
items from the glossary with items from the tagged database (which
it identifies using the unique tags) to create one or more
translated databases.
Voila! You have French, German, and Italian versions of your Web
site.
The
Domino Global Workbench process works like this: First,
you select the source database containing the design
elements to be translated. Workbench lists these
elements in a glossary; human translators open the
glossary and manually enter translations. Meanwhile,
Workbench creates a tagged database, a copy of the
source database where each translatable element is
replaced by a unique tag. Finally, Workbench uses the
tags in the tagged database to retrieve the translated
text from the glossary and create a translated
database. | | A Choice of Database
Configurations
As I
mention above, when you localize a Web site into more than one
language, you can choose to create either a separate unilingual
database for each language, or a single multilingual database that
incorporates all languages.
If you take the former route, a separate database of design
elements is created for each language. In the example above, you
would get a French database, a German database, and an Italian
database. This requires that your Web site have a page up front
where people choose which language they want to use to view your
site. If they choose French, they’re sent to the French database; if
Italian, they’re sent to the Italian database, and so on. This might
be a good model for a company with offices worldwide, where a Domino
server at each country location serves the local language. Local
developers and content providers can maintain their version of the
site, and users can enjoy a faster response time from a local
server.
If, instead, multiple languages must be served from a single
location—say your company has only one Web team, or people in a
local region speak a variety of languages—you might do better
outputting to a multilingual database. In this case, Workbench
stores the French, German, and Italian design elements in one
database. Your developers have only one database to maintain.
Furthermore, people don’t have to choose a language when they go to
your site. Instead, the Domino server determines a user’s language
by looking at the language setting in their Web browser. It then
automatically displays content in the appropriate language.
Synchronize
Updates Across Languages
A new
feature added to Workbench 5.0 is synchronization. In a synchronized
database, whenever a document is created or changed in one language,
other languages are automatically updated to reflect the change. All
you or your translators have to do is manually translate any text
contained in the change and then review the content after it’s in
place to make sure it’s presented appropriately.
When you set up a database for synchronization, you flag each
form within the database as one of the following:
- Translatable says that all documents created with the form are
to be translated and synchronized. If you change a document in
English, for example, the change is noted in a database view that
lists all outstanding changes to be translated. Translators
monitoring this view supply the new text, which is plugged into
the appropriate language’s site.
- Global indicates that documents created with the form are to
be synchronized but not translated. If you plug in a new image
that’s the same for all languages, for example, the image appears
in each version of the site, but no one is notified of the need
for translation.
- Local signals that documents created with the form are to
appear only in their original language and so are neither
synchronized nor translated.
One other thing about synchronization is that when you
synchronize a multilingual database, a language switch bar
consisting of a flag for each available language appears at the top
of your site visitor’s Web browser. People can click each flag to
switch between languages. (The switch bar doesn’t appear for
unilingual databases.)
Schneider
Electric’s Multilingual Web Site
Schneider Electric is a $650 million subsidiary of the
European manufacturer Group Schneider, which specializes in
the electrification and automation of industrial machinery.
Schneider Electric has seven plants in the United States,
Germany, and France.
In September 1997, Schneider Electric decided to build a
multilingual extranet where country managers and sales
organizations could quickly access product information and
technical support. Schneider had already decided to use Lotus
Notes, Domino, and Domino Designer for messaging, groupware,
and Web development. Now the company wanted to globally
distribute product launch documentation, catalogues,
industrial specs, brochures, and sales presentations, updating
localized content in minutes instead of weeks.
With the help of Transaction Information Systems ( www.tisny.com), a
systems integration house and Lotus premium business partner
in New York, Schneider built an industrial-strength
multilingual extranet, called Enterprise, in Domino 4.6.
Using Notes Global Designer (the 4.6 version of Domino
Global WorkBench), Schneider and Transaction Information
Systems translated all the design elements in the original
extranet to alternate languages, creating a multilingual Web
site. For instance, when French-speaking users enter the site,
they see a French screen, navigate through the site in French
and call up documents in French. Wherever possible, French
users are presented with a French user interface.
"Rather than just the content of the site, all the design
elements—the keywords on buttons, text on navigators, text on
graphics—appear in the user’s preferred language," said Mark
Elder, vice president of strategies and solutions,
collaborative applications technology, at Transaction
Information Sytems.
"By providing native-language support, we speed the global
adoption of e-business systems," said John McElfresh, director
of e-business at Schneider Automation. "If we can provide true
multilingual support over our extranet, we believe our
tactical advantage over competitors in each country will be
enormous." | Finally, note
that you can synchronize languages across unilingual databases, or
you can synchronize all languages within a multilingual database.
But you can’t synchronize unilingual databases with a multilingual
database.
Automatic
Translation Technology Available, Too
If you
want to try out the latest translation technology, you can replace
or augment your human translators with on-the-fly content
conversion. Workbench can be used with the Domino Translation Object
to connect a Domino server to machine translation engines, which can
at least take a first stab at making your prose intelligible in
other languages. You will still probably want real people to review
and refine the output. In addition to the translation object and a
translation engine, you need the Alis Translator for Lotus Domino
(for more information, see www.lotus.com and www.alis.com). This
technology also opens translation capabilities to developers through
LotusScript or Java.
Whatever your resources for localization—be it human talent or
automated technology—building a multilingual Web site will make the
difference between getting people around the world some information
about your services versus no information at all. These people may
turn out to be valued and paying customers. If you have a
Domino-based Web site, Global Workshop can provide a lot of the
functionality and flexibility to help you complete job.
TONY PATTON lives in Louisville, Ky., and has been working with
Notes/Domino for longer than he cares to say. Check out his new
book, Practical LotusScript, available from Amazon.com. E-mail:
asp01@aye.net. |