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• Posted March 20, 2012, 12:17 p.m. - 12 years, 9 months ago

Infix goes multilingual

The first phase of Infix localisation is complete. Infix PDF Editor is now available (in no particular order) in Chinese, Russian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Czech languages.

 

These new versions include localized “Welcome” and “Quick Start” documents and install the local spell checker (where appropriate) by default. We haven’t yet taken the plunge and translated the entire User Manual into those languages. If we get enough call for this, then we’ll do it.

 

We are also translating the web site to match and have so far completed Russian, French, Spanish and Portuguese.
If you download from the English pages of the website, you will see links to all the other language versions at the bottom of the download page. If you download a localized version and it doesn’t immediately display in your language, go to File->Preferences and change the GUI Language option.

 

Though we used professional translators for this, when it comes to answering support emails, that’s still down to us and careful use of Google translate!

 

Technical Challenges

Translating the application, documentation and the website all at once has been a real experience – sometimes good, sometimes bad. On the plus side, we found some really great translators on Proz.com. However there were also a few not-so-great which suggests it’s just pot-luck even after you take references into account. When you find a good one, you stick with them!

 

In terms of software tools to perform the translation we opted for two, the first being Sisulizer. It catered for all of our needs though not without a certain amount of pain. At times the app was very buggy and prone to losing our work. However, it does receive free updates fairly frequently and seems to be becoming more stable as time goes on.

 

The second piece of software we found invaluable for the translation of Infix was Infix itself! For translating the PDF documents – Welcome.pdf and QuickStart.pdf we used Infix to export them to XML, Sisulizer to translate the XML then Infix again to import the translated XML straight back into the original PDFs. Of course we found and fixed a few niggles along the way but it’s a really cool way of dealing with PDF translation.

 

The language roll-out is on-going – next on the list is a German website. We’re much older and wiser now, so it should all be a little easier this time!

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