MAKE Y0UR INTERNET OUTREACH MULTILINGUAL
Geraldine Wright
Soul Food Ministry


My E-mail: gw_grin@yahoo.com
Soul Food Ministry web site: http://www.soulfoodministry.org

Getting documents translated

  1. Volunteer vs. hired translators
    2.
    1. Volunteers are useful for short translations: letters, 1 or 2 paragraph articles, prayer requests, flyers, brochures, etc.
    2. Larger articles need professional translators
  2. Finding translators for hire
    3.
    1. Talk to others who have had documents translated. They may have recommendations.
    2. Check the phone book - this will get you a translator who is physically close
    3. Check on the Internet - many companies advertise on the Internet and are perfectly happy to receive and deliver documents and invoices through E-mail
    4. Many companies can do multiple languages, so if you find one you trust they may be able to do all your translation work
    5. Expect to pay around $0.15 a word
    6. Make them prove themselves
    7. Don't deal with companies that have sloppy business practices: can't get the invoices to you, forget about your job, estimates far off from actual job cost
    8. Who we use
  3. Proofing translated documents
    4.
    1. Since translation is done by mere humans, no document will be perfect
    2. Recruit a volunteer checker who is a native speaker of English and is fairly fluent in the target language. They will be able to spot typos as well as mistranslations.
  4. Pay your translators promptly!
    5.

Getting documents into electronic format

  1. Make the translators give you an electronic version of the document, not just a hard copy
    2.
  2. Get the proper fonts onto your computer
    3.
    1. Western European languages are no problem; the characters can all be produced by the default fonts which are automatically installed when you load Windows
    2. Other languages, excluding Far Eastern (Eastern European, Middle Eastern, Russian, African, etc.)
    3. Far Eastern (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.)
  3. Entering foreign characters
    4.
    1. Using the CHARACTER MAP to enter characters not on your keyboard
    2. Using ALT+Numeric keypad to enter characters not on your keyboard
    3. Using standard US keyboard to enter characters from Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French (and perhaps a few others)
    4. Entering characters from other languages, excluding Far Eastern
    5. Entering characters for Far Eastern languages
  4. Getting hard copy into electronic format
    5.
    1. You will need a Twain scanner and a Twain compliant optical character recognition (OCR) program. Get a scanner with 300 or 600 dpi resolution in order to increase the accuracy of the OCR.
    2. OCR for Western European languages
    3. OCR for other languages, excluding Far Eastern
    4. Far Eastern
    5. OCR tips
  5. Formats for storing files
    6.
    1. For Western European languages, you can get away with storing files as plain text in order to save disc space.
    2. For anything else, you will either want to store it as a word processor file, or as a "Unicode Text File". These files take up more disc space, but save the extra information to tell the computer what character set the document uses.

Getting documents on the Internet

  1. HTML. What is it? Do you need it?
    2.
    1. HTML is the set of commands that tells the browser how to interpret and display the content you sent it. You can edit the files with a simple word processor like WordPad, or buy an HTML editing program like HomeSite.
    2. Many HTML editors are available which allow you edit the content on a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) screen. The editor then generates the HTML code behind the scenes for you. FrontPage, DreamWeaver and Netscape Composer are examples of such editors. Microsoft Word can also save things as HTML files, but puts in a lot of extraneous, unneeded code, that bloats the file size
    3. The HTML standard is found on the web site www.w3.org
  2. Specifying character sets
    3.
    1. The character set for Western European languages is default. You don't have to do anything special
    2. For anything else, you or your web page editor will need to put in a special HTML command to tell the browser which character set to use when displaying the page
    3. You will also need to set up your browser to see the characters so you can read the pages you create
  3. Specifying text direction - refer to the reproduced workshop slide below
    4.

    Workshop slide 1

    1. Left to right is the default. In this case, the document is in Hebrew, and we need to set the base direction for the whole document as right to left, so we use the command
      Right to Left tag 1
      The text will then start at the right edge, and the letters will displayed with the first one furthest to the right. Notice that the order as displayed in the browser is reversed from the order in the HTML command. The code
      Text encoding 1,
      which codes for the character
      Hebrew character 1
      and which you entered first, is rendered at the right edge. The second character, which is coded by
      Text encoding 1,
      appears 2nd from the right, and so on. Your HTML editor may or may not be able to put this in for you; I could not get either FrontPage or Composer to put it in. You need to be prepared to insert the code by hand.
    2. To specify one complete paragraph as right to left in an otherwise left to right document (or vice versa), enclose the paragraph in the commands
      Right to Left tag 2
      There is a paragraph in English embedded in the otherwise Hebrew document, so we need to replace the "rtl" in this command with "ltr".
    3. To specify an isolated right to left word or phrase in an otherwise left to right paragraph, (or vice versa) enclose the word or phrase with the HTML commands
      Right to Left tag 3
      We have an English phrase embedded in an otherwise Hebrew paragraph, so we need to replace the "rtl" in this command with "ltr".
  4. Getting the text into the web page
    5.
    1. Typing directly into the WYSIWYG screen of the editor
    2. Entering plain text from a file
    3. Unicode text documents
  5. Special techniques for inserting small amount of text with foreign characters
    6.
    1. Using graphics - refer to the reproduced workshop slide below

      2. Workshop slide 2

    2. Using Unicode numbers - refer to the reproduced workshop slide below

      3. Workshop slide 1

The author of this material is Geraldine Wright, the multilingual mischief maker who manages the non-English pages of the Soul Food Ministry web site.



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