September 15th , 2009 → 11:58 am @ admin // No Comments
At the end of October it will be just 1000 days until Weymouth and Portland welcomes competitors from around the world to The National Sailing Academy for the sailing events of The 2012 London Olympic Games. We know from feedback we are getting from the local leisure trade that this is starting to result in increased business as national teams eager to practice in Weymouth Bay in advance of the 2012 Games.
Hotels and self catering units are receiving enquiries and bookings and restaurants and other service industries are staring to see a build in trade as our international visitors take advantage of their leisure time whilst here.
At this weeks Sail for Gold event there were competitors from 38 countries involved and we would imagine for the 2012 Games themselves this number would be significantly higher being not just competing teams but also press and spectators from around the world.
So just how were we going to be able to give all these foreign visitors the opportunity to access Weymouth and Portland information in their own language? To have translators manually translate our pages into a minimum of twelve languages would be impossible without unlimited budgets which we doubt even the Olympic organisers would have and besides new pages will be being published most days so it would be an impossible logistical task.
The only viable option was the use of automatic translation processes. OK they are done by computers and they don’t always get it quite rights but we figure that if we were travelling to a country where we didn’t speak the language we’d far prefer the effort be made to provide us with something in our own language than nothing at all. We’d be quite forgiving of mistakes and grateful that some effort had been made, so we’re sure that will be the attitude of the majority of Weymouth and Portland’s foreign visitors over the coming years.
Today we upgraded our translation software and are pleased so far at the results we are getting. 20 language translations are provided and the online system handles the translation of one page language every 5 minutes. This means that every time we add a new page to the site within two hours it will be translated and all the translated pages will be stored on our server meaning they don’t need to be re-translated every time they are accessed.
We would really appreciate some feedback on how good and useful this facility so if you access a translated page and are able to read it please send us a comment using the form at the foot of the page and let us know how good/useful you found the translation.
You will find the translate facility flags towards the top of the right hand column of all the sites pages. It doesn’t yet appear on the home page but we are working on this and should have it fixed soon.
Click here for the article in The Daily Telegraph that convinced we had to make the translations a top priority for the site’s launch.
Tags: Tech Site Updates
