Offering your website in multiple languages is becoming increasingly important, but translating your content into another language is no easy task. But for the 2% of the world’s websites that run on the open source CMS Drupal, that task just got a little easier today. Acquia, the commercial company that provides support for Drupal has struck a partnership with the collaborative translation company Lingotek which will allow the Drupal community to translate large amounts of their content.
Lingotek can be embedded directly into Drupal through a set of APIs, which will give Drupal community members access to unlimited language translations.
Lingotek’s Collaborative Translation Platform allows content to be categorized by administrators, who decide how particular content needs to be translated based on its relative value. Very important content is handled by professional translators, while moderately important content is handled by your community, and less important content can be handled by machine translation.
For example, you might opt to have professional translation for certain kinds of material such as official publications. But other content, such as a wiki for example, can be translated by your website’s community, giving you colloquial and subject matter accuracy but for lower cost. This way, community members not only contribute translations but also rate the precision of translations as well.
By combining machine translation with crowdsourced and professional translations, Drupal users will be able to produce near real-time translations while reducing the costs often associated with translation efforts.
So by partnering with Lingotek to give Drupal customers access to this reliable and rapid content translation, Acquia will enable site owners to expand the reach of their communities globally.
“Internationalization and localization have long been priorities for the Drupal community,” says Dries Buytaert, Acquia co-founder and Drupal project founder. “Lingotek’s translation technology helps Drupal site owners deliver multi-lingual site experiences and engage members of a Drupal community site to participate in the translation effort.”
