Oceanik AlphaMosaik 2010 Difficult Translation Issues with SharePoint 2010

With a client of ours, I was investigating why several translations weren’t working properly. It turns out things weren’t translating properly because of several different reasons.  I’ve described them below, so hopefully you can look for these yourself in the future. 

• It appears that one of the bigger issues is often that the apostrophes are not consistent between the expected translation (which uses the top character), and the content pages, which are using the bottom character.  The best way to fix this is to make them all use the same character.  To do this, go into the content page and directly replace the problem character with a proper quote (‘) character.

** Here’s a zoomed in view of what I found.

• The second issue was that sometimes the translation was trying to encompass an entire paragraph, but the content page had the paragraph broken down into multiple different lines.  So the translation would never match the content it was trying to translate.  To fix this, go into and edit the content page directly and remove any extra line breaks, to make the paragraph fit altogether into one.

• The third issue was again back to special characters, but instead of quotes, it was a dash – I’ve also noticed this as an issue with double quotes as well (“” vs “” – always use the second style of quotes “”).  The best way to fix this is to replace the dash or quotes directly in the content page with a proper dash or quote character.

** Here’s a zoomed-in view of the problem special character:

• Another issue that can come up is double spaces in the content, when the translation has only a single space in it.  Fix this by removing any extra spaces directly in the content page (1 space should be the default, and be sufficient in most cases).

• Sometimes you’ll end up with weird characters that can only be seen by copying the text into a text editor (like notepad), and finding that there are characters before (leading characters) or characters after (trailing characters) which are unprintable characters, and are not necessary.  Simply delete these characters directly on the content page (and in the translation if they exist there too).

Also, you will often end up with more than 1 issue in a paragraph.  Just keep fixing the different issues until the translation starts to work.

• In this case, it appears that the translation and the page content have fallen out of sync.  Here you’ll have to fix one or the other (I don’t know which, so I made no changes) to make the translation work again.  Using a text editor (like notepad) to compare the text of the content page to that of the expected translation is a good way to recognize that one paragraph is longer than the other.

These were the main issues I was able to identify.  In some rare instance, some pages will need to have 2 “versions” of the page.  For example, a page is going to have to have an English and a translated version of the page, when the entire content is encapsulated in a picture, and is not translatable.  We’ll need to make a Translated version of the image and set up the two pages accordingly.

Hopefully this helps you to solve your translation issues.