You don’t have to be a localizer to use this nifty plugin from transposh.org. However, what you do need, to localize your website into one or more languages, is knowing the target language (s) well. It is best if you translate into your native language. It’s often referred to as “mother’s tongue”. And you must honestly answer to yourself a direct question – after re-reading your final edit): “Does it really look and sound natural?” It should. Otherwise, google, bing or many other MT (machine translation) engines should be all we needed.

Being a professional Russian translator with over 40 years’ experience, I found it extremely easy to quickly generate translations of my own pages. I have used many CAT (computer aided translation) tools before, but Ofer’s offering (sorry, couldn’t help it) was the fastest, easiest to learn and use. In short, Transposh beats them all hands down. Even though the other guys ask hundreds and even thousands piastres for their goodies, and Ofer doesn’t even take donations (at least, as of today).

Using the Transposh on this blog was a piece of cake. Installation was pretty straightforward and everything worked as it should right away. The only inconvenience I found so far is inflexible segmentation of translation units and punctuation marks. Russian is a much lengthier language than English. Punctuation marks are used differently. But even those are not a huge problem for someone who loves to play with his native language, knows it well, and can twist words around. The biggest problem other early adopters found in this application was a US flag instead of a Union Jack to denote English in the language menu. I agree with what Ofer answered to their accusations and can add something he couldn’t afford: “Fuck you! You fucking fucks!”

Conclusion: I am happy I switched to WordPress from Drupal (on this site), if I didn’t I would be clueless about Transposh. This will be my favorite toy for a long time. I will tell all my trusted friends what a nugget I found.

Hats off to Ofer Wald!

One and a half years later (this article was first published May 24, 2011).

I had to remove this module because it overloaded my database to the point that my host provider disconnected my server. It took us nearly two months to figure out the problem. Sorry folks. You’ll have to use off-the-shelf shit like Google Translate if you don’t know the language but want to read my shit.

😉