eBook translation to French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish & Arabic (difficult)
I’m having a bit of grief getting Google Translate to upload and translate my Document to French, it just seems to return an English translation.
I tried https://www.onlinedoctranslator.com and they ask for a donation and add something to the header in the docx file. I cut/pasted into other documents twice to try and make sure there was no added stuff to the document. I don’t want to go through the process of reformatting and making all the links again.
Another method is to upload to Drive, open as a Google DOC and then save it then use Translate (under TOOLS) but it only does about 40 of 135 pages. So maybe needs to be chopped down. I split the document into 4 to get the full translation and then pasted them all into one document.
Weird that the German Translation all went through fine. I’ve been wondering if there is a limit, but I wasn’t logged in before and I logged into Google this time as well. All a bit odd. Maybe high demand but it was a Sunday avo, so that doesn’t seem right either.
Nothing on the interwongle about not translating whole manuscript either.
I followed the same procedure as per the German edition and upload and all went well.
Links not working when checking upload
In the Links for Viewing Book before publishing the webpage links worked as did the links to the videos but the ones for downloading the files didn’t, they just took me to the main Revit Shortcuts page, not to the download files. This is a bit troubling. I checked in the translated manuscript and that took me to the actual download location, so a bit of a worry.
French Translation. Submitted for approval
2022-05-09 1:18 pm Will now wait to see if it is to be approved. It was approved a couple of hours later.
I put on French site.
Portuguese Translation
Same issue as the French version so I went to GDocs and did it there, it was definitely cleaner than the French version.
I put the Brazil site as the main site as that seems to be where traffic has come from so far, rather than Portugal.
Uploaded at 2022-05-09 5:38 pm
Awaiting approval- got an approval email, in English? But not seeing it on the store 2022-05-09 7:07 pm
Italian translation
A few extra items to improve the edit. Find :: ; and Replace :: ; this takes comments and moves them out a bit further for the script command line. Works quite well.
A bit of trouble uploading the Book Description, doesn’t like hidden characters and had to drop a paragraph off then it loaded. Uploaded just after 4pm on 10 May. Hopefully an approval then I can get on with another, Spanish next. Approved by 5.30pm.
Put on the Italian site
Spanish Translation
Started in the avo and submitted at 7.45pm. Hopefully approval later this evening. Approved overnight. 21 pages read so someone looking at that one.
Put on the Spanish site
Arabic Translation- Hard
The Arabic translation had an upside down apostrophe and was in front of all the send commands so they wouldn’t have worked if someone cut/pasted the code, so I made a decision to leave the code in English totally so there was no conflict.
I then wondered how Arabs code, they must do it in English.
looked on to Revit in Arabic and saw that they were using the English version, so I suppose the issue with the keyboard mapped to specific languages is a bit of a challenge.
But in Word a lot of odd symbols, instead of ; semicolon they had some odd shape and the question mark was a bit more ornate and reversed. All a bit complicated. I gave it a shot then decided that I’d leave the code clean for cutting/pasting & running. So Word formatting can be a bit of an issue that I may have to keep an eye out for in Khmer and other FOREIGN characters like Japanese & Korean.
Also , all the languages above you went to KDP and chose language where you logged in, but for Arabic (Beta) you did it all in English. So I think THAT’S the process I’ll need to do for other books.
Also there is an Amazon.ae (Arab Eremites) site but I couldn’t get onto that for the Main site so chose Amazon.com.
A day so far and still not approved, they have 3 days to approve it. It took the whole 72 hours to approve, but available now. On KDP but not Authors page yet (day published).
End Comment
I’m not sure that it would be easy to automate the process, too many odd bits of translation that you need to pick up. Although for Send/return they are good items to use in find/replace, although I do wonder if they are also being altered in the body of the text as well.
The process is getting to be predictable and if you are doing it at the same time for different languages you know which bits to watch out for. So leaving it for a while will need another steep learning curve, so best to do as many at the same time, although it can get boring.
As its only been a short time I’m not sure whether its worth the effort to translate to different languages. Time will tell.
Just noticed A+Content you can add pretty to your book somewhere, may be worth exploring.
