translation Translation "on the fly"

[Lyonel]

Hi guys,

I have been asked a really difficult question by my boss today: "Is it possible to translate manually on the fly content in Hornbill?"... 

Let me give you a bit more context. We have plants and offices all across EMEA, including IT Support staff. Unfortunately our users and not really bothered with high-tech, web sites, quality of data, etc... When they contact us, it's because something is broken and they need it fixed ASAP, or they have a question which needs an immediate answer (pretty much like all users I guess ! ). As a consequence, they do not setup their profiles properly... Here is the distribution of languages:

And countries:

As you can see, this is not great... Pretty much every single user has its profile setup with English when they are not in an English speaking country. 

Now this is getting problematic when for example John from Greece logs a request in Greek, but his profile is in "English". In this scenario, we do not get the "translate" button available:

 (Sorry for the poor quality, screen grab from youtube!)

Another example (this time with a German guy): Thomas logged a request via the portal (great!) but because his profile language is set to "English" here is what we see in the request details:

It is the same on all the timeline...

Having given some context, I hope you will understand where my boss comes from with his question: how can we get the "translate" button available here? This is to date one of the main "negative" feedback we get from our analysts all across EMEA and we cannot really blame them.

The way I see it, I can only think of 2 options:

- Change the language of all users properly => not really long term solution especially as all our users are automatically synchronized with our Active Directory (using the LDAP User Import utility) and therefore I cannot really do much (given that the AD does not have a language field) 

- Change Hornbill to give us this possibility to translate on the fly (a bit like Google translate)? 

I am of course opened to any suggestions! 

PS: Don't shoot the messenger!!

[Lyonel]

I forgot: I would love to know how you guys manage this situation if like me you have users from all over the world!

[James Ainsworth]

2 hours ago, Lyonel said:

 

Now this is getting problematic when for example John from Greece logs a request in Greek, but his profile is in "English". In this scenario, we do not get the "translate" button available:

Hi Lyonel,

I thought I would start with this one.  This icon should only be available to those users that have the role 'Translator' assigned to them.   This option allows you to change all of the labels, even within the same language so it should be limited to those that have responsibility of managing translation data.

Regards,

James

[James Ainsworth]

3 hours ago, Lyonel said:

 

 (Sorry for the poor quality, screen grab from youtube!)

Another example (this time with a German guy): Thomas logged a request via the portal (great!) but because his profile language is set to "English" here is what we see in the request details:

The translations currently work using the along side the profile language settings.  So when a user posts or writes something it is accompanied with the language code.  When some one reads that post or written information it will compare the reader's language in their profile with the language saved against the original post.  So, in this case, even though the text was in German it had the English language code saved with the text as the user's profile was set to English.  So our translation thinks it is English to English and therefore the translate option is not available.  For this scenario we don't have an option to detect the language when the language typed is different from the one set in the profile. 

[James Ainsworth]

3 hours ago, Lyonel said:

Change the language of all users properly => not really long term solution especially as all our users are automatically synchronized with our Active Directory (using the LDAP User Import utility) and therefore I cannot really do much (given that the AD does not have a language field) 

I think that there is a preferredLanguage CN in AD.  However, if this is not being used then I  would think that it would be the same effort setting this up in AD as it would be to setting up the language for each user in Hornbill.

James

[Lyonel]

13 hours ago, James Ainsworth said:

Hi Lyonel,

I thought I would start with this one.  This icon should only be available to those users that have the role 'Translator' assigned to them.   This option allows you to change all of the labels, even within the same language so it should be limited to those that have responsibility of managing translation data.

Regards,

James

Hi @James Ainsworth the screenshot was from Google and only used for the "Language" field. I am very well aware of the translation mechanism for the UI etc.. Sorry if this image was confusing 

[Lyonel]

13 hours ago, James Ainsworth said:

The translations currently work using the along side the profile language settings.  So when a user posts or writes something it is accompanied with the language code.  When some one reads that post or written information it will compare the reader's language in their profile with the language saved against the original post.  So, in this case, even though the text was in German it had the English language code saved with the text as the user's profile was set to English.  So our translation thinks it is English to English and therefore the translate option is not available.  For this scenario we don't have an option to detect the language when the language typed is different from the one set in the profile. 

@James Ainsworth yes I know it works like you described it, but this is exactly the problem we face due to people not configuring their language properly...

13 hours ago, James Ainsworth said:

I think that there is a preferredLanguage CN in AD.  However, if this is not being used then I  would think that it would be the same effort setting this up in AD as it would be to setting up the language for each user in Hornbill.

James

And here you guessed right: the field is not populated nor maintained in the AD.

So basically, your recommendation is for me to manually update the profiles of each user. Question: if I update a profile from English to German, the posts language from english to german (for that user) and then go back to a request logged by that user with some german text, will I then get the "translate" button? Or is the language saved outside the database accessible tables?

[James Ainsworth]

Hi Lyonel,

I believe that the information that has already been saved against the request will have the language code stored with it, so switching language for the user, I don't believe will convert existing data.  I have also put the question about detecting the language back to our developers to see what options we can look at.  In the meantime having the user's profiles set to their preferred language would help and provide an immediate solution while other options are looked at.

Regards,

James