Re: FLASH: Translation

[Dave Broz]

I deal with different languages everyday (german, french italian, spanish

and english) and translation is a very expensive and time consuming thing.

Most of the translation is still done by language translators (humans) not

software. There is a good article in the latest Wired magazine (8.05)

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.05/translation.html about this.  But

you will discover there is no machine Translation Nirvana as of yet. Though

there are a few  companies out there trying..  checkout:

babelfish.altavista.com.   but it is very rudimentary.


In Flash,  I encode the different languages as variables and fill in the

textfields with the appropiate language variable  as selected by the user.

It is also a typographers nightmare as laying out for different languages is

difficult enough but when you set the whole text to field you have very

little control of how it wraps.  I have a tendency, because I deal with it a

lot, to always ask what languages will be required,  as soon as they say 2

or more or if they are unsure whether or not it will be translated I

automatically use textfields where ever possible.  saves a lot of work in

the future, though it can be a little ugly..

of course it depends what the client wants and how much they want to spend.


good luck...



----- Original Message -----

From: Paul Hagwood <

vampfan [dot] geoyahoo [dot] com

>




> I have been working on demos for IBM

> (http://swaydemo.dfw.ibm.com/connected/) and I am now

> being hit with translation. Right now we are sending

> the demo to developers in Europe and Japan to

> translate all the text. My question is, does anyone

> know or can think of any way to use the flash program

> (or actionscript) to translate part or all of the text

> to other languages?

> Right now my word has been that we have to have a

> seperate effort to translate all the text but the

> client isn't satisfied with that and I'm getting

> pressure to prove that there is no magic multimedia

> program that can magically translate all the text. So,

> if you know of an authoring program that can do such a

> thing, please let me know that as well. Thank you.




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