Background

The Gateway to Careers website (www.councils.org/careers/) provides essential information on careers in the key sectors of the Canadian economy. The site includes information about the vital contribution of each sector to Canada’s economy, the many different career opportunities in each sector, and the skills and training that is needed to work in a sector. We handled 9 languages – Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, Korean, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog and Urdu.

The Challenge

At first the client provided all contents in Word document format, which would have created a lot of extra workload to integrate the translation back into the 9 sites, and the launch time would have needed to be postponed accordingly.
Secondly, the client had difficulties entering the text for Right-to-Left languages (in this case Arabic, Farsi and Urdu) through an integrated editor in the system, so they asked us for help. This resulted in extra workload that they didn’t expect.

The Solution

For the first challenge, since the multilingual websites were deployed through a CMS system, we checked with their programmer who was deploying the to see if they could extract and package all the text/contents to be translated into XML or XLIFF format. We then carried out a test by providing Chinese characters in the XML file they prepared so they could test whether they could import the Chinese XML file successfully into their system. The client was satisfied and prepared the contents for the 9 languages in XML format. Both our teams and the programmer who was to integrate the translation back into the system were able to work on the files very efficiently.
For the second challenge, through research we found that the problem was a result of a compatibility issue in the integrated editor of the CMS. Our RTL languages team used a self-developed tool and ran a few tricks to help the client enter all the changes in these 3 languages.

The Benefit

The client’s multilingual websites were launched successfully as scheduled.

…We were very fortunate to have access to wintranslation’s expertise, especially in solving the unexpected issues with the R to L languages… all of which were key to TASC being able to launch the site successfully.