[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] cost of adding a language (OPAC)

[Dan Scott]

On Wed, Jan 04, 2012 at 05:01:53PM -0800, Lori Bowen Ayre wrote:
> Does anyone have any wild ideas about what it might cost to fund the
> translation of Evergreen into another challenge (OPAC only).  I'm wondering
> about Chinese.  Any ideas at all?
> 
> Is it in the range of $20,000-$50,000?
> $50,000-$100,000?
> 
> More?

If you're talking about just the strings that you would find in the
JSPAC such as opac.dtd, opac.js, searcher.js, and db.seed (as found in
https://translations.launchpad.net/evergreen/master/+lang/zh_CN), then
you're looking at 7,000 words or so. (At 4,500 words, db.seed contains
way more than just the words needed for the OPAC, so you could try to be
selective about what gets translated, but let's go with the top limit
for the purposes of this exercise.)

Let's also assume that you're going with a translation service instead
of friendly volunteers filling in the translation on Launchpad. Take a
raw estimate of $0.25/word from a place like
http://blog.globalizationpartners.com/software-translation-services.aspx
(that post mentions $0.20/word, but we'll inflate a bit; $0.25 / word
was the rate that was being fetched by fairly specialized translators
years ago) and you're at $1,750 for raw translation.