Alfresco and Drupal and Lingotek, oh my!

by Chris Vitti on October 30, 2012

translate buttonBack in June we launched the new alfresco.com in English, which I talked about in a previous post. Since then we’ve been hard at work building the French, German, Spanish, Italian and Japanese counterparts. Over the past four months, we have successfully pushed out a new site every three weeks and have now launched the final site.

Here at Alfresco, we do our best not to attach files to emails and not to use email for workflow.  So the thought of translating content via Word attachments and back-and-forth emails makes me cringe. That’s how I did it at my last company, that’s how we did it with the previous generation of alfresco.com and I refused to do it again.  So we searched for a better solution and evaluated five vendors along the way.

The final choice was Lingotek.  Lingotek is both a translation platform and a translation services company. As I mentioned before, we are using Alfresco+Drupal to power the new alfresco.com.  Lingotek integrates with Drupal via their Lingotek Collaborative Translation module, which provides a way to push content from Drupal to Lingotek, get it translated, reviewed and approved before being sent back to Drupal — all without the need for attachments or emails.

Let’s take a look at it in action- you can activate Lingotek on a per content type-basis in Drupal.  For example, if you have nine content types, but only want five of them to be eligible for translation in Lingotek, you can do that.  Similarly, you can choose to automatically push content to Lingotek or manually push the content with this setting:

Lingotek settings

Lingotek module setting in Drupal

We chose the manual route because some changes may not warrant re-translating (punctuation, typos, etc.).  So, we make a decision with every new and revised page if we want it sent to Lingotek or not.  When we do, we just click a button (literally), and the content goes to Lingotek:

Lingotek button

The button in Drupal that allows you to push content to Lingotek on-demand

From there, the content is translated within the Lingotek platform by Lingotek’s professional translators (or you can use your own translators) before it gets reviewed and finalized by an Alfresco employee who’s fluent in the target language:

Lingotek platform

The Lingotek platform ('Workbench') where the translators and reviewers translate content from the source language to target language

When the translation is done, the page is marked as complete in Lingotek and then flows back to Drupal.  You can do this either automatically or manually. And you can check the status of any page at any time in Drupal to see where things stand:

Lingotek status

Language-by-language status within Drupal so you can see the progress in-context

If you’re a fan of Alfresco, a fan of Drupal and need to support multiple languages on your website, I highly recommend this solution.  Here are the resources to get you going:

Any questions?  Just post them below.  Enjoy.

Tagged as: Drupal, Lingotek, WCM, Web Content Management

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