Making an existing Career portal available in Arabic language as well

International Arabic
#1

As salaamu alaikum / Hello,

Our company is getting a Career portal developed on Core PHP by an IT company here in India. Currently the website is in English only and we wish to make it a bilingual platform - i.e available in English and Arabic. The current service provider does not seem to have expertise on building multilingual portals. Could anyone here suggest as to how exactly we can have our website available in Arabic as well. since it is a career portal, all the content would be the jobs uploaded by the employers/ users at the front end. In this case how will the text uploaded by the users in Arabic appear to the users viewing the website in English and vice versa? Will the text entered by the users always appear in the source language only without any translation or is there any way of auto translation (any reliable way other than Google translator etc).

Urgently need help on this and any help would be greatly appreciated.

P.S B I’m from a non IT/programming background so please excuse my ignorance.

#2

walykom al salam / Hi skybrick,

you said in you question that your service provider has develop your solution using pure PHP without using any framework or tool.

in this case there is no specific way to achieve this functionality or an easy away i can just list here.

if you ask about Yii2 framework way i can always point you to use yii2 Internationalization guide here https://github.com/y...utorial-i18n.md

when you speak about the bilingual website. you always have 2 parts of the equation which i will describe now casually:

  • website look and design: like menus, messages, title, page direction handling (LTR/RTL) … etc. <it is the easy part>

  • website content: articles, blogs, information entered by users (like in your case) <the hard part>

for second part i believe in my opinion we should not use any kind of auto translation at all, unless you are OK with getting strange results.

when the content is in a particular language you always need to show it in that particular language.

for translation you just let the user to re-enter his own CV in the other languages, that is it.

i hope this can give you a glance over internationalization fog! :)

regards.

#3

Thanks Muaid,

That was some good sagacious advice and answered in a very simple way for non technical dummies like myself.

In getting a multilingual website, the only hard part for us as you mentioned, is the content uploaded by users and a lot of service providers have been suggesting auto translation for it, so that the data search does not miss out on things. But given to the experience that we have with auto translators, its been a BIG NO NO at our end. They have been assuring us that there are some efficient API’s out there, though the search at our end for them has been futile. Do you think there are some effective auto translators out there that we could purchase?

Also, when the content is displayed in the source language, how effective is the data search in that case? would it not then mean that to search a job that was uploaded in arabic, one needs to search in arabic itself and so an english user can never search this job?

Thanks once again for your time and opinion.

Stay blessed!

#4

oops! sorry for late, i saw your reply just now.

I am not sure about how this will effect search results.

anyway I am not a fan of auto translator things at all, if you ask about my opinion then i do believe there is no API out there can auto translate in efficient and effective way. you cant let the machine understands human text context! it is not about words, it is the context! context is the major thing here. you can try to translate your last reply to me in google translator (Eng -> Hindi) and good luck with the result and i think google’s API it is not like any random company API.

i think for this type of business you can limit the need to search by content it self. i mean if i am an employer then i will search for certain employee by: (category, years of experience, etc ) as you can see most of those things can be pre-translated (the easy part remember!)

for searching in the content itself maybe if you translate a keywords list for key words it can help or even consider using translation API only in search keywords (i am not sure if this is the best practice i am just trying to think with you in this part):

what i mean is when someone search for <programmer> the application will translate it to <प्रोग्रामर> and then search for both words <programmer><प्रोग्रामर> and show the results.

just check this #1 Jobs website in the middle east and see how they solve your issue: https://www.bayt.com

btw, i do have experience working with Indian company (Hyderabad) they promise to provide us a bilingual application but they fail at the end due to auto translation solution which was not acceptable by no means.

good luck and i wish you the best with your project :rolleyes: