Translating TeamLab, or TeamLab Online Translation System

8 December 2011By Elena

Click to zoom inAs you certainly know, TeamLab is already available in 11 languages: English, Chinese (simplified), French, German, Greek, Italian, Latvian, Portuguese (Brazilian variant), Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. At the moment it’s being translated into Czech, Polish as well as Ukrainian, Swedish, Korean, Indonesian, Slovak, Finnish, Dutch. All that has become possible thanks to our Online Translation System specially developed for translating TeamLab.

A year and a half ago when TeamLab was a newborn consisting of two modules only – for business collaboration and project management – inc. an internal messaging tool, it already spoke English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish languages. Six months later this smart child also acquired Italian and Latvian. These translations were performed using our own resources and the process itself was not that easy – each translator had to install a special program on his computer and copy .resx, .xml files that were subject to translation. At the same time we received lots of email from our users offering their assistance in translating TeamLab. All these reasons moved us to develop a system that would be easy and convenient to use and manage.

TeamLab Translation System represents a kind of a portal with restricted access – only the guests with appropriate rights can log in into the system and perform some actions within it. The TeamLab translators are allowed to view all available languages (that might be helpful during the translation process), but edit their ones only. Besides the following advantages of TeamLab Translation System can be seen with the translator’s naked eye:

  • Online translation
    Our translators don’t need to install additional software any more, they just enter the system URL into the address bar of their web browser and can start translating right away.
  • Ease of use
    They move from key to key with a single mouse click, translate them one by one and save the result using the only available button.
  • Translator assistance tools
    Our translators have a plenty of tools at their disposal that are ready to help them any time: other users’ translations into different languages (as mentioned above), earlier translations (in case some keys from the source language coincide), filters and search engine that facilitate the whole process.
  • Preview
    After translating a key, they have the possibility to click a portal link inside the system and preview the result in order to evaluate the translation accuracy.

Currently 38 translators are taking an active part in translating TeamLab into various languages using our system. The ones who finished their work we published on the Our Contributors page at our website to express our deep gratitude towards them for the assistance. If you also wish to contribute, you are welcome to write to us at documentation@teamlab.com. Further instructions on how to use the system can be found in our PDF guide.