ONLYOFFICE Translation and Content Writing Tools

Hello everyone!

We continue our series of blog posts about tools used for the ONLYOFFICE development and today we’d like to show you a small piece of the ONLYOFFICE content writing and translation team world.

But, before we start, we would like to congratulate our team and translators all over the world on International Translation Day and wish them continued success in everything they do.
Keep up the great work!
 

Here is the list of tools our content writers and translators work with:

#1 TeamLab Online Translation System (TOT System) is the system designed for those who provide translation services on a voluntary basis. Thus, everyone who wants to translate ONLYOFFICE into his or her language can submit a request to get the invitation and join ONLYOFFICE Translator Community. As TOT System is designed for the web-office translation, only users with appropriate rights can log in into the system to use it. To start translating, you are not required to install any additional software at all.

When we only started ONLYOFFICE localization (it was TeamLab in those days, that’s where the translation system name comes from), we needed some tool which would let our volunteer translators translate the developer generated code mixed with phrases without any difficulties. That was rather a difficult task, because there IS much code in ONLYOFFICE and, among this code, there are words and phrases which need to be translated. So we asked our developers, who knew their code best, to give us such a tool. And one day they came to us with the concept of the translation system. We offered our amendments, they accepted some of them, rejected some others – it was a usual work process, you know. In the end the translation system was adopted. We tried it ourselves first, then gave it to our translators all over the world. There strong and weak sides in it, but all in all it proved to be working and not too bad, I should say.

Alexander, Head of Content Writing and Translation Department

#2 ABBYY Lingvo is a software combining up-to-date dictionaries and instant translation features. Apart from general, professional, specialized, regional and explanatory dictionaries, it also includes thesauri, phrasebooks, dictionaries of idioms and abbreviations. Every dictionary entry is accompanied by detailed information on each word: meanings, word-use examples, grammar references, synonyms, antonyms, spellings, phonetic transcriptions, etc..

I don’t think much can be said about ABBYY Lingvo, as it is one of the most known dictionary software in many countries. When translating you need to use some dictionary and Lingvo was our choice. It is just a good tool.

Alexander, Head of Content Writing and Translation Department

#3 Microsoft Visual Studio Express for Web is an environment for web applications and services development. It enables you to use the full-featured markup and code editors, design-time tooling and other tools to create compelling outputs of project, for deployment on-premises or in the cloud.

As we are mostly not translators but writers (the authors of the ONLYOFFICE Help Center), we need something to work with the website creating the content for the Help Center – writing articles, FAQs, guides, etc. We could ask programmers to insert everything we write to the website and use some text processor for our creations (ONLYOFFICE Editors would do quite alright), but we wanted to eliminate the intermediate link and write and publish the content ourselves. As our websites are built on Microsoft .NET, Microsoft Visual Studio Express for Web was the natural solution for this task. We write, format to HTML and update the website whenever anything new comes out, without the need to ask web developers or someone else to do that. We are autonomous and it is good for everyone, I think – developers do not waste their time on us, we do not need to wait for them to deploy the latest documentation changes to the website.

Alexander, Head of Content Writing and Translation Department

#4 Demo Builder is a tool to create tutorials, presentations or demonstrations showing how software and systems work. The program lets you record both full motion video and a series of screen shots of the entire desktop or a selected area and automatically generate a movie clip with moving cursors and popup hints. It’s possible to add to the movie annotations, highlights, text boxes, visual transformations, animation effects, etc.. Among other features available there is auto-annotation, localization support, text-to-speech transformation, support for audio narration and background music, click zones and more.

We use Demo Builder to create clear illustrations for our Help Center. The program allows to add explanatory captions over the screenshots.To create a video tutorial that demonstrates our software functionality, we just work in the online office as usual and record our desktop activities. Then we cut out all the unnecessary scenes, add effects, some text comments and synchronize a narration track with the video — it’s quite simple. However, when we need an advertising clip, we turn to our designers for assistance.

Svetlana, Senior Content Writer

#5 AVS Video Converter is a multimedia processing tool designed to convert videos between the most popular formats (AVI, MP4, MPEG, WMV, FLV, MOV, 3GP, etc.), for a variety of devices (Apple, Android, Samsung, etc.) and video-sharing websites (YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr). Plenty of conversion presets let you tweak certain settings such as video codec, frame size, audio quality. The program also gives a possibility to edit input video files and apply effects if needed.

AVS Video Converter helps us to perform final video processing by adding our logos at the beginning and at the end of the video record. It has a wide range of ready-made conversion presets which allow to receive a result in a few clicks and easily upload it directly to our YouTube channel.

Svetlana, Senior Content Writer

 
Wish to become an ONLYOFFICE translator? – Contact us at documentation@teamlab.com