How to translate with Joomfish

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How to translate with Joomfish

(5 votes, average 4.80 out of 5)

Written by Marco Cevoli

Wednesday, 03 September 2008 13:30

Joomfish is a multilingual content manager for Joomla, one of the most used content management systems.

his short tutorial will show you the process of translating content for a Joomla-driven website using Joomfish. Please note that these instructions refer to a Joomla 1.5 installation, but are also suitable for Joomla 1.0.

Joomfish is an additional plug-in for the content management system called Joomla. This kind of plug-ins are called "extensions". Please note that Joomfish is not included in a standard installation of Joomla, so it must be separately installed by the webmaster. Joomla is an online system that requires no local installation on final users' side.

In this example, we will translate a new article from Italian into English. First of all, open your browser and type the address of the back-end for the external site you're going to translate. Typically the address has the following structure:

http://www.externalsite.com/administrator

Joomla backend is displayed. You should be a registered user for the external site in order to be able to login and use Joomfish. Please contact the webmaster if you are not a registered user or if you don't have enough privileges to view the Joomfish menu.

Now login with your username and password. You should see Joomla control panel. Go straight to

Components | Joomfish | Translation

As a general rule, avoid to mess with other buttons and menu items unless you know what you are doing.

On the right side of the screen, you are prompted to select the type of content and the language into which you want to translate. Therefore you should select "English" from the dropdown box on the left and "Content" from the dropdown box on the right. The list of content articles is displayed. Now select "Only published" elements, to filter out all items which are not published (that means, not visible on the actual website).

Can you see a green tick sign under the "State" column? It means the content article has already been translated. On the other hand, a yellow bulb means that the original has been modified, so that the translated content needs editing.

At this point you can choose the specific article you want to translate by clicking on its title. Once inside the article, you'll notice that there is an input field for each field of the original article: title, alias, etc. There are also 2 buttons on the right of each section:

a "two pages" icon, which copies the content from the original to the translation and
a trashbin which clears the content.

Now you can translate all these fields. Once you have finished, click the disk icon on the top, to save the page and go back to the items list. If you want to cancel, click on the red X, "Cancel". Do not use the "Back" button on your browser, because in doing so, you lock the content item. (and you need to go back to the item in order to unlock it). At the end of the job, simply log-out. Remember that you can always check what you are doing, previewing the front-end site. Click on the small icon ("Preview") in the top-right position to open a new browser window.

Repeat this simple procedure to have all your content translated into one or more languages.

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Comments (5)

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...

Finally, you wrote that Languages drop down does not mean original language, but the language one wants to translate the content to.
It seems developers forgot to mention this!!!

aa , July 18, 2009

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Thanks aa, we know that Joomfish is not that easy, that's why we posted this article.

Marco Cevoli , July 18, 2009

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Ciao ho una domanda...la traduzione funziona perfettamente, tuttavia pur avendo spuntato la casella pubblic per joomFish..la traduzione compare solo per gli utenti registrati...puoi aiutarmi..thx..Ciao.

Marco17 , December 09, 2009

...

Passami ulteriori dettagli in privato e ti rispondo via mail.

Marco Cevoli , December 09, 2009

...

Finalmente!!La vostra spiegazione è la dimostrazione che insegnare è un arte.

Le Chapeaux , September 09, 2010

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