Update on Progress

, 12

Recent Launch

Firstly, thank you to everyone for your patience these past 2 or 3 weeks. Soon after the relaunch to our new website, I had some unexpected family stuff to deal with. I know how difficult this must have been for some of you – some of you even asked if I was still around – yes, I’m here for the long haul!

Now these family issues are over, I’m back and keen to get moving on developing great new functionality for the Multilingualizer.

Bug Fixes

Today, I’ve released an upgrade to the core code which fixes a number of bugs – the most important bug fix is for when you are increasing the number of languages on your site. This bug fix now allows you once again to have any mix of any number of languages on your site.

For example, if you currently have 2 languages, and you decide to increase to 3 languages, you may only have part of the page translated into the third language and other parts still only configured for 2 languages. This now works gracefully again – if the user has chosen language 3 and it doesn’t exist, language 1 will be defaulted to.

Coming Improvements

The biggest problem that Multilingualizer users experience is understanding and using the 4 dots and 2 dots markers. There are 2 techniques – the shorthand, for single lines of text line menus, page names, product names where you can just separate your language texts by two dots and the Multilingualizer will hide what’s not required for the user and then the longhand version for blocks of text: 4 dots on their own line, then text 1, then 2 dots on their own line then text 2 then repeat for however many languages you have and finish the text block with 4 dots.

I understand that this can be confusing and it’s one of the biggest obstacles to making the Multilingualizer conquer Bablic and LocalizeJS completely.

Easy Translations

My development plans to fix this are as follows:

1. Your Multilingualizer admin page will scan your website and extract all of the text blocks from all of the pages.
2. It will then provide an interface to enter your 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th languages etc
3. It will also provide an interface to have your original text either machine translated (e.g. to get you started in a new language) or sent for automatic human translation – this human translation would obviously incur a cost which scales depending on translation quality required and the number of words to translated
4. You will then be provided with the text with the markers added to paste back into your site.
5. The Multilingualizer will also optionally log into your website (you provide the username and password) and update your text for you – either a page at a time, or the entire site

The important thing to note here is that I have no intention of removing the key benefit of the Multilingualizer – the reason we are better than Bablic and LocalizeJS is because your translated texts sit on your own pages. That means Google sees them. That means your customers can find you. This will never change.

However, using the techniques above, I will be able to replicate what IS good about Bablic and LocalizeJS – and that is the ability to quickly extract all of the text from your site, send it to translators, then quickly integrate it back into your site.

Google Snippets

The other key development I’m releasing is to allow you to choose your own markers – instead of 2 dots to separate languages you can choose a single character you don’t use on your website or a group of characters you won’t use.

Instead of the 4 dots to start a text block, you will be able to choose a text pattern to your own liking.

You might be wondering why this matters if the Multilingualizer is going to automate all of the marker placement – it matters, because Google sees these markers and may choose to include them in snippets the users see when their finding your site. By letting you choose your own markers, you will be able to do things like:

text1 ~+~ text 2

or

—
text1
++
text2
—

The reason the dots were chosen was so they look like regular Google snippets – Google can choose to pull text from anywhere on your page – depends on the page and what text the user searched for in Google – and Google regularly will provide a snippet like this:

… the Multilingualizer is better than Bablic and LocalizeJS …

By using the 4 dots and 2 dots as markers, then if Google chooses to extract a passage of text from your site which has the markers in it, users are less likely to have a jarring experience.

e.g. You could have in your snippets:

Hello World ++ Bonjour tout les mondes

vs

Hello World .. Bonjour tout les mondes

It’ll be a matter of personal choice and style for your website.

Once all of the remaining bugs are fixed, I will be full steam on the easy translations feature. If you spot any bugs, please raise them in the Q & A section.

If you would like to access the upgrade code, log into your /my-account/ and follow the instructions.