Q&D ASP.Net localization?

[Corvus]

We have a significant ASP.Net web application I am considering localizing to
Spanish. All the .aspx and .aspx.cs files have hard-coded English.

The issue is that we are a small company without any native Spanish
speakers, and for business reasons we cannot send out our source files or
spend much money on these conversions. What is the simplest, cheapest,
fastest way to localize an existing ASP.Net application?

The current plan is to hire an external consultant to do the language
translation, have them log on to our web site, download the browser source
for the resulting pages, translate those to Spanish and send them to me,
then for me to copy our existing .aspx pages and cut and paste the
corresponding text.from the translated pages to our source pages. I would
like to keep the code-behind pages consistent between languages. I can set a
session variable for what language the user is browsing, but don't have time
to change all the Response.Redirects, hrefs, hyperlinks and so on in all the
code-behind pages to the new page.

I realize this plan is not ideal, but we have no money or time to make
extensive changes to our existing pages. In fact, the original plan was to
duplicate the entire web site and run it through Google language tools. I
argued this would be a maintenance nightmare and result in poor-quality
pages. The expense of hiring a contractor to translate static pages is close
to sinking the proposal, and we absolutely cannot afford more than a week to
do the complete translation. Less than a day is more the target.

I would like to accomplish the proposal on budget in a way that will avoid
large-scale changes to our existing pages, yet will leave the ability to do
a proper, resource-based, conversion incrementally as time allows.

Any suggestions as to how to proceed? Is this even feasible? This is a
skunk-works-style project, and anything that requires a lot of time, money,
or cannot be safely integrated with our existing site, which is also
undergoing constant change, will result in the localization proposal being
abandoned.

[Guoqi Zheng]

ASP.NET has a nice solucation for this which is called globalization.

You can put those language content in a resource file (XML file), this file
is just like a hasttable with key and value. you can send organize this
file, send it to the translator, when it sent back, you put it into your
resource folder and compile it. you can google for more information.
search terms. asp.net multi lingual web site.

good luck.

"Corvus" <co****@telus.net> wrote in message
news:UY4gf.206003$ir4.125731@edtnps90...

We have a significant ASP.Net web application I am considering localizing to Spanish. All the .aspx and .aspx.cs files have hard-coded English.

The issue is that we are a small company without any native Spanish
speakers, and for business reasons we cannot send out our source files or
spend much money on these conversions. What is the simplest, cheapest,
fastest way to localize an existing ASP.Net application?

The current plan is to hire an external consultant to do the language
translation, have them log on to our web site, download the browser source
for the resulting pages, translate those to Spanish and send them to me,
then for me to copy our existing .aspx pages and cut and paste the
corresponding text.from the translated pages to our source pages. I would
like to keep the code-behind pages consistent between languages. I can set a session variable for what language the user is browsing, but don't have time to change all the Response.Redirects, hrefs, hyperlinks and so on in all the code-behind pages to the new page.

I realize this plan is not ideal, but we have no money or time to make
extensive changes to our existing pages. In fact, the original plan was to
duplicate the entire web site and run it through Google language tools. I
argued this would be a maintenance nightmare and result in poor-quality
pages. The expense of hiring a contractor to translate static pages is close to sinking the proposal, and we absolutely cannot afford more than a week to do the complete translation. Less than a day is more the target.

I would like to accomplish the proposal on budget in a way that will avoid
large-scale changes to our existing pages, yet will leave the ability to do a proper, resource-based, conversion incrementally as time allows.

Any suggestions as to how to proceed? Is this even feasible? This is a
skunk-works-style project, and anything that requires a lot of time, money, or cannot be safely integrated with our existing site, which is also
undergoing constant change, will result in the localization proposal being
abandoned.

[Corvus]

> You can put those language content in a resource file (XML file), this

file
is just like a hasttable with key and value. you can send organize this
file, send it to the translator, when it sent back, you put it into your
resource folder and compile it. you can google for more information.
search terms. asp.net multi lingual web site.

Thanks for the suggestion, but doing this would require replacing every bit
of text in every page with label elements, replacing every image with
server-side images, and writing code to load these elements at runtime.
Totally impossible in my time available. We can only do this project if it
takes no more than a few minutes per page, and preferably can be automated.