MichaelF mentioned elsewhere:

quote:

The Groupee network is a broad one, servicing thousands of sites. This is the reason for the 'general' Groupee email. Since it is Groupee-wide it can't be customized by you. There are some upcoming language options but again these are localization controls rather than changes to wording in your control panel.

What languages are you localizing for? Please, please, please tell me you are including Japanese. Since switching over to Groupee login, we've noticed that some of our new Japanese users haven't been able to figure out how to confirm their email addresses.

If you need localization help, btw, you might try:
http://webproject.jp/

Hi Hank, we currently plan to support Chinese, Spanish, German, and Portuguese. We do not currently have a Japanese language coordinator, so if you know of someone who might be interested in assisting us with that, please let us know. We would love to add Japanese localization support, but we prefer active community users as our locaization agents, not services.

Tell you what, Ted. We have thousands of Japanese users and, since our community is powered by Groupee, they are all Groupee users. If Groupee would like to write up a request for help, we will translate the request and give you free ad space.

Having the request bilingual will help, since non-bilingual members who notice it might notify other members.

You could include contacts in your message, and we could form a private thread to make it a team effort, if you like.

Would it be useful, for starters, if we connected some Groupee staff with our moderators to discuss the various challenges? Let me know.

QUESTION: When you say that you will support "Chinese, Spanish, German, and Portuguese" do you mean that users of any single community can switch interface between English and those languages?

In other words, it's not completely useful for us to have the entire interface only in English. It would be even less useful to have it all in Japanese. Ideally, what our community needs is to have an interface that is switchable between English and Japanese. Currently, our English native users have no trouble, but the non-native users struggle.

Hi Hank-

Once this is released, yes it will permit user-customizable localization. The site will select its default language, but individual members can override that to use any of the available localizations (if that is a word).

We've actually finished much of this locatization project, but it will likely wait until 2.0 is released.

Here is a link to our topic on recruitment of Language Coordinators:

http://community.groupee.com/eve/forums?a=tpc&s=729...10888763#85710888763

Feel free to translate that if you wish, though of course the benefit would go to you as site owner.

Okay, let's see... We can get you perfect Japanese text that is Groupee savvy, and wouldn't even ask for a discount. But we would want to know more about how user-customizable version 2.0 is going to work. For example, on the admin side, all the various language wordlets will be Groupee default wordlets, right? And when administrators need to customize a given wordlet they will have space for each language version of that wordlet?

We have a large, thriving community. Half the members are Japanese and half are non-Japanese (from around the world). But it's not our livelihood. It isn't set up to generate revenue. If we can make Groupee easier to use for our Japanese members, we'll do so only out of ... erm... compassion. Thing is, we've already donated thousands of hours of our life energy to this free community. If the localization work would take up too many more hours, we'll just say screw 'em. (Limits to compassion. Hehe.)

So, if the specs for 2.0 look useful for our particular community, and if it's not too time consuming for us to get the Japanese text in there, we'll do it. The easier you can make it for us the better. I mean, it takes ages for us to localize wordlet by wordlet. If you could get us an Excel file with the IDs in the first column and the English in the second column we would gladly put perfect, Groupee-savvy Japanese in the third column for you and send it back to your team.

Hi Hank- we do provide tools to make it easier for our Language Coordinators to do the translations and if having an excel spreadsheet is what you would need to do the initial translation, I'm sure that could be arranged for the initial translation. (After the initial translation, it is pretty easy because we show you only the new/changed wordlets that need to be translated).

Either way, if you have interest, or further questions, please do contact us (as detailed in the link I provided above). And even if you are not interested, rest assured that Japanese is a high priority language for us and it is likely that eventually we will find someone else to assist us.

All the best,

Hello Hank

I'll email you directly with some details and examples to check out. Most of all I think you need to see the Groupee wordlet control panel in action. It really is quite easy to use. The toughest part of the job is checking out the details of your translations as they appear in the real Groupee pages.

One thing I want to emphasize is that the end user can choose the Groupee network login language he or she wants to use. The community itself has languages set by the admin. There can be multiple languages in a community (by forum for example) but it is the admin who chooses which langaige goes where.