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Contact Me
Translation of the website
I have received several time messages with the offer:
"What about a translation of your website to
.........? "
My website is relying very strongly on screen-dumps, showing the
procedure step-by-step:
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Should just the text explaining the
the procedures be translated ?
But in other languages, the screen looks
different, because the tab-names, the
items in the selection-boxes, the context
menus (right-mouse click) and the names
of the buttons are all in the different
language.
So, leaving the graphics in English and
translating only the text would look very
strange and would make it very
difficult to follow the procedures.
Example:
Sharing a disk under NT4, the
screen shot is from a Dutch system,
compare the Dutch context menu to the
English context menu:

T
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Imagine now the screen shots in English (example: the word
"sharing") and your text having to explain , what this
is in your
language (example in Dutch: "Delen" ), it will look
very strange and will be very difficult to read and understand.
That is the reason, why I am not in favor of a text-only
translation.
A proper translation would require also to re-create the graphics
in other languages,
which is a HUGE workload, since each topic would need to be
configured on a system
to be able to make the local-language screen-shot (lets
also not under-estimate the workload
to maintain such a website with new information)
Also, to do this job, it requires to have all the operating
systems (Windows95, Windows98,
Windows NT4 workstation, Windows NT4 server and Windows2000)
installed on one or
more systems in the local-language.
And then, all this information needs to be stored on a
web-server:
the English version of the WoWN-website is currently using 20
Mbytes, so each
translated language would require an equivalent storage space.
You still like to ask the question concerning translating the
website ? contact me.
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