Simple Website Translation Engine

Web Lite SWeTE: Simple Website Translation Engine

 

 

Web Lite Solutions Corp.

Quick Tour of Web Lite SWeTE

This article provides a brief overview of what SWeTE is and how it can be used to localize your website.

What is SWeTE?

Web Lite SWeTE is for organizations with small websites who have access to in-house translators or can accept machine translation, that need to provide their website in multiple languages at very low cost. It is a free hosted website translation service that provides a mechanism that enables organizations to self-translate their websites into any language and achieve professional results.

How does it work?

  1. You copy and paste a specific snippet of HTML code into any webpages that you wish to localize.
  2. SWeTE uses its sophisticated machine translation engine to translate the text of the webpage.
  3. You use SWeTE's simple translation form edit the machine translation, or provide your own translation.
  4. When users visit your website, they will see a language selection menu where you pasted the SWeTE HTML snippet. This menu allows the user to select their desired translation. They will see the translation that was provided by you (or the machine translator, if you choose to enable it).

Important to note

  • The user does not leave your website to view the translated pages. If your website address is http://www.stevessite.com then the user will still see http://www.stevessite.com in their address bar for all translated pages. There is no indication to the user that the translated text is actually managed off site.
  • Automatic Language Detection is used to try to detect the user's preferred language so that users will automatically view your website in their preferred language if you have provided a translation. E.g. Chinese users will automatically see your website in Chinese.
  • You can approve or retract translations, and you can set your site up to require your approval before any of the translations are visible to your users.

Your Users' Perspective

When a Chinese user visits your website he will see the Chinese translation by default (if you have enabled Chinese, and approved the translation). Similarly when a French user visits your site she will see the French translation by default. If you have not approved a translation for the user's preferred language, they will see your site's original content untranslated, so it falls back gracefully.

Your visitors can easily select a different translation by selecting another language from the language selection menu that SWeTE provides.

The SWeTE Language selection menu that is automatically provided by SWeTE when you add the SWeTE HTML snippet into your webpage.

Installing SWeTE in your Webpages

Translating your webpages with SWeTE is as simple as copying and pasting a snippet of HTML code from SWeTE into the webpage. This snippet is automatically generated for you in the SWeTE control panel for your website. After the snippet has been installed in your webpage, you should see a language selection menu with flags for users to select their preferred language.

Translating your Webpages

SWeTE provides a simple web-based translation form to translate your webpage into multiple languages. There are two ways to access this form for a particular page.

  1. From the SWeTE Toolbar?, a convenience feature that provides you with useful translation tools while viewing your SWeTE-enabled webpages.
  2. From the SWeTE Control Panel?, a web-based administrative console the provides you with all the tools that you need to manage your website translations.

The translation form shows you the original text (to be translated) on the left, text fields to enter your translations on the right. The first time you load a translation form for a particular webpage, the translation fields will be pre-populated with machine translations of your text. You can choose to keep these translations, edit them, or delete them and start from scratch. Fields that contain machine translations are clearly marked in red so that you can easily distinguish between human translations and machine translations.

The SWeTE translation form allows you to easily translate your webpages from one language into another.

After submitting this form, you can approve the translation so that your website users can see the translation on the public site. You can also set up auto-approval? for your website if you wish to forgo the approval process and have the translation appear immediately.

Translation Memory

The translation form is equipped with a translation memory feature so that you can browse through similar translations that have already been performed. This is useful for re-translating text after a small change has been made to the original text. You can use translation memory to see the previous translation with the differences clearly marked.

The Translation memory form is accessible by clicking on the magnifying glass icon next to any translation field.

Approval Process

By default, the approval process is disabled so that users can see your translations as soon as they are available, whether or not they are machine translations. However by enabling approval for your website, you can limit access to translations until they have been approved by you.

There are two ways to approve a translation:

  1. From the SWeTE Toolbar?, a convenience feature that provides you with useful translation tools while viewing your SWeTE-enabled webpages.
  2. From the SWeTE Control Panel?, a web-based administrative console the provides you with all the tools that you need to manage your website translations.

Once a translation is approved, it is visible for the public to see.

SWeTE Toolbar Button

The SWeTE Toolbar Button is a link that you can add to your browser bookmarks bar (or links bar) that gives you access to the SWeTE Toolbar? for any SWeTE-enabled webpage. This allows you to quickly and easily translate, approve, and manage the translation for any page that you are browsing in your web browser.

For example, suppose you are browsing the French version of your webpage and you decide that you want to make some changes. Just click on the SWeTE Toolbar Button on your browser's links bar, and your SWeTE Toolbar? will appear, with a link to access the translation form for that page. You can then modify the section that you wanted to change, and approve the translation to make your changes live immediately for all to see.

SWeTE Toolbar

The SWeTE Toolbar? is a menu that appears along the top of any of your SWeTE-enabled webpages if you are in administration mode. You can access the SWeTE Toolbar by either clicking the SWeTE Toolbar Button on your browser's links bar, or by appending the following GET parameter to your page URL: 

 --weblite-admin=1
The SWeTE toolbar which appears at the top of your SWeTE-enabled webpage if you are in administrative mode.

SWeTE Control Panel

The SWeTE Control Panel? is an administration console that allows you to:

  • Add new websites to translate
  • Add new webpages to translate (an alternative way to add pages is to simply add the SWeTE code to the page and navigate to it in your web browser).
  • Approve and Retract translations
  • Translate pages.
  • Edit website settings.
  • Monitor changes to your translations.
  • More...

One useful feature of the SWeTE Control Panel? is the Webpage Status Grid? which gives you a bird's-eye view of your webpages and their translation statuses, as well as quick links to approve, preview, submit, or translate the pages.

The webpage status grid allows you to easily see the status of each of your webpage translations. If you hover over any of the statuses, you'll see a menu of options you can perform on the translation such as preview, approve, retract, submit, or translate.

Search Engine Optimization

SWeTE can be extended to activate multilingual search engine optimization so that your website will be listed on foreign search engines also. Please contact Web Lite Translation Corp. for more information.

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