ICanLocalize

As a software author, one way to expand your user base is getting your product and/or site translated into other languages.

I have done that in the past by having users translate my language files, and also by getting my main program and help translated by a professional, as well as my web site.

While hard data is hard to get - it's difficult to know if a German user would have bought my software if it was only available in english - I feel it was a great investment. Changes are small over time, so the translation I paid for years ago still helps sales now.

However, getting it done was quite a bit of work, specially the help files, which are surprisingly brittle after exported out of my help authoring software of the time - Helpscribble.

One interesting option is ICanLocalize, which has amazing tools to help. After reading about the release of a new Help & Manual importer tool, I got around to trying their tools to translate my web site to Spanish.

I'm quite impressed. While I used a hand picked text file with segments of the site before, their system downloaded my whole site, allowed me to pick what pages I wanted, and then extracted the text segments to minimize the number of words.

At this points, it's quite easy to remove any text that doesn't need to be translated, upload it to their site and set it for bidding by translators.

I'm waiting till tomorrow to see if any more bids come in, and then I will choose a translator. I will report further on the experience then.

One other feature of the site I liked is the ability to request small translations - such as user messages, or getting small changes to your program translated.

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