Internationalization

By Sandra Schloen, May 2019

The primary OCHRE client used by most users is written in Java which has extensive support for internationalization features. Several such features are discussed here.

Preferred locale

OCHRE is in the process of being translated into multiple languages. Our current priorities are French, Spanish, Turkish, and Hebrew, given that these are the areas in which many of our clients work. If you wish to hurry along support for any language other than these, please let us know. If you are a fluent speaker of a non-English language and are willing to be a reviewer or consultant to work with us to adapt the OCHRE interface to other languages, please let us know!

Users can choose their preferred language from the Preferences tab of their User account. Currently, the only language with significant support is French (due to our collaboration with the CRANE project in Canada).

If ever you wish to suggest better translations than are currently available, please email us at ochre.uchicago.edu. We are currently otherwise heavily reliant on Google Translate.

Default language

English need not be the default language of a project. If you wish to use a language other than English as your project's default, make a selection of the Default modern language from your project's Information page. This needs to be done once, at the outset of the project, and then not changed thereafter.

Regardless of your default language you may want to Enable multilingual features from your OCHRE project's page. This option ensures that separate tabs are provided for content in other languages, selected from the languages that are opted-into here.

Note that this feature is only available when ONLINE.

Using the Google Translate API

Google makes available translation features via an application program interface, or API. OCHRE uses this to allow auto-translation of strings for projects which have enabled multi-lingual processing (see above).

Let's say that you have entered a Name or Description or Note in English. But you want to make the same string content available in another language. OCHRE's speech bubble lets you select other languages for which to include content. When you choose a non-default language, a button with the flag representative of that language will appear next to that string field. Click the flag button to have Google Translate translate the original string-content into the selected language. The character string returned from Google Translate will be assigned to that string's tab for that language. You can edit this content if needed, then it will be saved as the language-specific content for that field.

Flags of the relevant countries are provided by the Geonames API.

Reverse Translation

Let's say the content you wish to add exists only in a foreign language. OCHRE can take the foreign language text and use it as the source to populate your primary language tab. Follow these steps:

  1. Add the foreign language text to the primary language field.

  2. Add a new language tab.

  3. Navigate to the newly added foreign language tab.

  4. On the foreign language tab, click the flag representing your primary language.

  5. This sequence moves the foreign language text to the current tab and adds your primary language translation to the primary tab.

English field has Italian content

Reverse translate

VoilĂ !