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Issue No 150 July 2005

Translation work

Have you ever considered selling your products overseas? If you have then the internet is a medium that allows your potential market to expand into an international one. By simply building a website and displaying information about your products, you can be advertising to internet users located anywhere in the world. But not all of these potential customers are English-speakers. In fact, some estimates indicate that less than 35 per cent of internet users have English as their first language.

How can you target the growing number of non-English speakers using the internet? One product that simplifies this process is called Tuku, which is a multilingual content management system (CMS) provided by TheVirtual Limited, an ICT innovator based in Christchurch.

Tuku allows you to have your website pages available simultaneously in multiple languages. Currently there are over 50 languages supported, including Pacific Island languages and Maori. Visitors to your website have the opportunity to select which language they would prefer to view your site in by simply clicking on the appropriate flag. When a flag is selected (clicked on) the site will be transformed to display in the language associated with that flag.

Tuku supports two forms of translation:

• Machine translation: software translates the page(s) for you.
• Human translation: an automatic notification is sent to the translator requesting translation of the page(s).

As Tuku is a content management system, anybody with access to the site can change or add content. It also has workflow support, highly configurable security settings and many add-on modules, such as collaboration tools, discussion boards, photo galleries, blog software, e-commerce software, email, newsletters and much more.

Tim Knapp
TheVirtual Limited

For further information visit www.thevirtual.co.nz, contact Tim at tuku@thevirtual.co.nz or phone us on (03) 980-6213.