If I have to choose one thing I really enjoyed learning throughout this semester, it just goes without saying I will choose Website Localization. During this course, I had opportunities to learn how to localize a website in general, and to do so, what kinds of knowledge I should be equipped with. For example, I got to learn that most of websites are being run on content management system (aka CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal, and etc. What surprised me was that each CMS has a variety of plugins (additional software that can be installed on CMSs to bring more features and functions for users and website managers). Of course, we could try out diverse plugins specifically designed for l10n in our class.
For final showcase at the end of the semester, my group had to come up with ideas as to what we are gonna do for our final project among topics we learned during semester. We learned how to create a static HTML website from scratch, played around with CSS to make our website pretty and good looking, and localized it into different languages. Then, we jumped into CMS world starting with WordPress. I believe that WordPress is the most commonly used one among others with a reputation of being user-friendly, easy, and simple. Among other CMSs we experimented in class, my favorite was also WordPress due to simplicity and minimalistic dashboard design it has to offer.
Without a doubt, we decided to proceed a project where we had to choose the content donor, redesign the whole website from the ground up, and localize it into different languages (Originally from Korean to English, Japanese, and Chinese). Me and my buddies decided to redesign the whole website of Kimbap Heaven (Very popular Korean restaurant franchise thanks to its affordable price and easy-to-get impression). We took some images from the website and began to design it with our own organizations and tastes.
Selecting the content donor and designing the website was an easy start. A huge challenge was waiting for us. As we tried out a couple of plugins in class, we wanted to explore a new one for our final project. So, we decided to go with TranslatePress. We installed the plugin and started to play around with it. But since we activated the plugin, the whole website was malfunctioning and finally stopped working. Like this.
We did our best to figure out what is going wrong but ended up in vain. Therefore, we couldn’t help but to look for another plugin we can try. Then, we met ‘Xlil-Language’
It had an easy and very simple interface for first-time users so I had no issues following its flow. But, of course, it had some iffy features we had to overcome. Translating contents was not hard, but when it comes to menus, it was literally pain in the butt. Just we learned in class, I did the same and exact process of creating multilingual menus but it didn’t work for Xili-Language. We spent few hours trying to find the issue but eventually ran into some information about how to resolve such issues on its website.
One of painful issues we had to go through was translating contents part. As we unconsciously believe (if you have ever used a l10n plugin) that a multilingual plugin will allow you to translate the original content by just duplicating the source page and replace the texts with translated words. For example, nobody would expect to recreate the original page from scratch again just only for translation. But unfortunately, Xili-Language was like that. So, we had to put all of the strings, texts, paragraphs, and even images again and then translate it. When you click ‘translate and edit’ on Xili-Language, it shows like this.
It was such a good learning process and helped me really a lot to gain a better understanding of website localization by revisiting what we learned in class and do it in an autonomous way. I am sure it will a big foundation as a professional localizer and later on, it will be a great asset when I go to the real market.