BabelKit Translation Utility

The BabelKit Translation Utility lets you enter codes and their translations into the universal code table.

Main Translation Page

The main translation page shows a grid with the code sets listed along the left margin and the languages to translate them into along the top. Each position in the grid displays the count of codes in that code set and language: 
                    en    de    es    fr    it
code_set             7     7     7     7     7
code_lang            5     5     5     5     5
country             87    87    87    87    87
currency            12    12    12    12    12
day                  7     7     7     7     7
month               12    12    12    12    12
                   130   130   130   130   130
In this case, the native language is "en" for English. If any of the non-native languages are missing some translations, that count will be displayed in red to highlight where translation work is needed.

If you click on the counts under any of the non-native languages you will get a display of each of the codes for that code set showing both the native language descriptions and the selected translation language descriptions. Click on any code to add or amend a translation.

Click on any of the code sets along the left column to see a list of just the native language descriptions. From there click on any of the codes to see all of the language descriptions displayed together.

Selecting Another Code Set or Language

At any point you can click on the "Main Translation Page" link to return to the overview and then click on any of the translation counts to view another translation set.

The other navigation aid is always displayed at the top of every page: 

      Select a code set and language(s)
    [Code Set?] [English] [(Other)] [View]
The first select dropdown lets you specify the code set that you are interested in. The second lets you specify the primary language and the third lets you specify an optional secondary language. Then click [View] to see the selected set.

Adding a New Code Set

Click on "code_set" along the left margin of the Main Translation Page or select "Code set" from the navigation dropdown to see the current list of code sets. Click the "Add new code set record" link at the bottom of the page.

Enter the new code set code and the native language description. For example "city" and "city". Click the "Parameter Set", "Slave Set" and "Multiline Set" boxes if appropriate. See the BabelKit Overview page for an explanation of these options. Click [Add] and start adding the codes for the new code set.

Adding a New Translation Language

Click on "code_lang" along the left margin of the Main Translation Page or select "Language" from the navigation dropdown to see the current list of translation languages. Click the "Add new language record" link at the bottom of the page.

Enter the new language code and the language description. For example "es" and "Spanish". Click [Add]. Happy translation!

Code Display Order

When adding or updating a code you can specify its display order by entering a number in the "Code Order" field. Negative order numbers can be used to make a code sort early.

When a code is first added in the native language, if the order field is not specified and the code field value is numeric, the order field is set to the value of the code field. This provides numeric sorting of numeric codes by default.

Obsolete Codes

When the time comes to retire a code from active use there are two approaches: deletion or deprecation. The problem with deletion is that the code value may still exist somewhere in the database. When it comes time to display the code description for a deleted code value only the actual code value is available which can be rather cryptic.

The solution is to mark obsolete codes as deprecated without removing them from the code set. This leaves the obsolete code descriptions in the code set for display purposes, but does not allow new data entry selection of deprecated code choices.

To deprecate a code click the "Deprecated" checkbox and then click [Update].

User Permissions

The Translation Utility contains hooks to allow or disallow any combination of code addition, update, or deletion. Combined with user authentication these hooks can be set up to give different users different privileges for different code sets and languages.