[Kenneth Smith]

I am building a site for a couple looking to adopt. Now they realize they need to have a Spanish version of their site. What do you recommend for making a multilingual site. A translator plugin is not accurate enough. The couple will do all the translation.

[amylaneio]

If they’re going to be doing the translating, the best plugin i’ve seen is qTranslate. It basically gives you two (or three, etc.) of each field when creating a post (title, content, etc), so all you have to do is paste the translated text into the appropriate boxes.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/qtranslate/

[Kenneth Smith]

muchas, muchas gracias, señior!

[D.K. Smith]

Be very careful of “machine” translations, which is what language plugins are. Far better to have pages translated by a person from the target country or region.

A few years ago we developed a large site that has a significant Spanish audience.

When I conducted focus groups with some of the Hispanic users they would not answer questions about the translation. After much cajoling they all said the on-site Spanish was not language they would use. Some found it to be offensive… like speaking pidgin-English to a native.

I think the issue may be that machine translations are Castilian (European) Spanish, while Spanish-speaking populations in the Americas have individual dialects.

You may want to be better safe than sorry in a sensitive situation like adoption.

You can try qTranslate’s human translations but check with someone from the target countries before going live. Mexicans, Cubans, Dominicans/etc all speak different Spanish dialects.

[Margarete Koenen]

I totally second that. And its not just Castillian vs other dialects. The difficulty is that every word can have multiple meanings depending on context. Each of those meaning might call for a different word in the language you are translating to. Just look at what happened to my first sentence. When I translated it to German it came up with a rather puzzling statement. To translate it back to English: “I completely in second place that.”

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