When building a multilingual Web site with Joomla! 1.5.x, one often requires to translate language files used by Joomla! core, components, modules, plugins and templates into various languages. While it's not difficult to open the original language file and the translation language file side-by-side and do the translation, it's a rather tedious work to compare those files to figure out the changes. Also, when you have a whole set of language files to be translated, how can you be sure all of the translations have been completed without checking each file?

Luckily there is an administrator backend compenent called Translation Manager can help with all those problems. In this article we will present a brief introduction to this handy component.

Installation

The latest version of Translation Manager, v1.5.1, was released more than one year ago in Feb. 2008. It can be found at its page on extensions.joomla.org. You will see download link that directs you to a joomlacode.org page. Translation Manager was built as an administrator component, so the installation is as simple as any other Joomla! components.

If your administrator backend uses Traditional Chinese as the language, you may choose to download a Traditional Chinese language file for Translation Manager at the Joomla! Taiwan forum. Just extract the archive into your Joomla! installation directory.

Configuration

After installation, you may want to inspect the configuration options provided by Translation Manager. To access Translation Manager, you have to sign into the administrator backend, and from the top menu select Components -> Translation Manager. On the Translation Manager page, click the Parameters button on the tool bar to get the configuration screen.

Some of the setting are rather interesting. For instance, there is a setting that activates the feature automatically searches and replaces phrases identical to the one you just changed. This in some cases can be used to ensure your translations consistent. One important setting is the Reference Language. It lets you choose the language on which your translations will be based.

Feel free to move your mouse pointer around to see tooltips for the available settings.