- Constructing the Login Page
- Translating the Site
- Creating the Resource Bundle
- Conclusions
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Translating the Site
You must now isolate the text that you want to be translated. For this simple page, the only text that needs to be translated is listed here:
Please Login User ID: Password: Login English Spanish Chinese
For a real application, you have to translate considerably more text, and you should use the services of a professional translation company. If you are simply doing a prototype, such as we are doing here, you can rely on an automated translation service such as AltaVista's Babel Fish.
This does not produce a perfect translation, but it is good enough for a prototype. You should never use this translation for a production system. To give you an idea of how bad the translation can become, consider the following English sentence:
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
This classic saying seems simple enough. Yet when it is translated into Spanish, the following sentence results:
El alcohol está dispuesto, pero la carne es débil.
Even if you know not a word of Spanish, you can already see that the word spirit was translated incorrectly to the word alcohol. Although this is one of the meanings of the word, it is not the meaning that I had in mind. To quickly test to see how good the result of the translation is, we run the Spanish sentence through AltaVista and translate it back to English. This results in the following sentence:
The alcohol is arranged, but the meat is weak.
As you can see, the sentence has lost most of its meaning. This is also particularly true with English computer words. Consider the English word user. Think about the meaning of this word outside of the computer industry: It means a person who only takes and gives little in return. Yet the term user simply means someone who uses a computer in the computer industry.