i18n, l10n, & t9n...?
oh my.

• t9n, or Translation
  • Communicating written meaning from one language to another.
  • Only one element of localization
     
• l10n, or Localization
  • actually adapting your site to a locale or target market.
  • Graphics, Layout, Date/Phone formats
     
• i18n, or Internationalization
  • a design mentality for developing code that can be easily localized
  • "How READY are you for localization?"

The Alphabet Soup, translated.

The Four Major Players

• Site Architecture
   
• Workflows
   
• Carefully Considered Code & Contrib
   
• User Experience

Site Architecture

Content!

Make thoughtful plans for how to manage your content.
 

• Use reasonable naming conventions.
   
• Keep your content and your layouts separate.
   
• Know what needs to be localized in a content type.
   
• Where do links live? Inline WYSIWYG or in link fields?
   
• Are there graphics with text that need to be localized?
   
• Are there downloads that need to be localized?

Steak. Knife.

D7: Field vs. Node translation

Which is best for you and your client?

• Field Translation
  • Creates a new field value with a unique language code, associated with the same NID
  • Only have one version of node for Content Administrators
     
• Node Translation
  • Creates a new Node ID for each target language
  • End up with multiple versions of a node for Content Administrators

D8 + Paragraphs

The best, most frustrating thing to happen to translation in D8.
 

• Find a solution that lets your customer request translations for the parent entity, that automatically pulls in and translates the child paragraphs.
   
• Nested Paragraphs are great, but require thoughtful configuration. Plan extra time for this step.

Workflows

Development

• Have a standardized Development workflow for your team.
   
• Discuss where and how to test your localization + translation.
  • Recommend finding a way to psuedolocalize the site during the Dev process.
  • Psuedolocalize = Practice using your translation process with Machine Translation for instant feedback to make sure everything you expect to translate on a page, is translating.
  • Saves your client time and money in the long run.
  • Psuedolocalize with a non-Latin character set language like Arabic or Japanese.
    ​
• After translations are live, have a plan for how new development can take place without disrupting the live translations.

Content Authoring

• Where is your client authoring content?
   
• Does your client need the ability to stage content
  for translation before it goes public on the live site?

Timelines

• Plan extra time into your development cycle for Psuedolocalization and resolution of issues.
   
• When working with a Language Service Provider, make sure everyone is on the same page with how long Human Translation will take. 
  • 1 Translator can translate 1500 words per day on average
  • 1 Reviewer can review 8000 words per day on average
  • 4 Translators is the max to put on a project for quality reasons
  • Throughput of 6000 words per day for quality.
     

Translation. Takes. Time.

The 4 C's

Coding for Localization

• DO NOT HARD CODE STRINGS IN TEMPLATE FILES.
   
• D7: t() is your friend. D8+Twig: trans() is your friend.
   
• DO NOT HARD CODE STRINGS IN TEMPLATE FILES. EVER.
   
• Most UI or template strings have to be downloaded into a .po file for translation with a vendor. This file can get pretty big because it also strings from Core. Be careful.
   
• NO REALLY. DO NOT HARD CODE STRINGS IN TEMPLATE FILES. EEEEEEVEEEEER.

Choose Contrib Carefully

• Support for i18n widespread in D8
   
• Popular Contrib modules still do it better
   
• Custom Ecosystems have more problems.

User Experience

Make it easy for your users.

If translation is hard, they wont do it.
 

• Identify places where you can create a UI to ensure everything that makes up a single end-user facing page is translated at once.
   
• Consider scripting initial pushes of entities for translation if there's a lot of content.
   
• Make it easy to determine if content has changed since the last translation.

Learn more!

• Find me or Christopher at the Lingotek booth!
   
• Lingotek on Drupal
  www.drupal.org/project/lingotek