The pulse really needs to be in French to have credibility and adoption on French-speaking campuses.
After a skype chat with a coworker who works on a Francophone campus, we decided to focus on translating all pages that a student who is signing up for a Discipleship Groups would see. This includes the group signup, personal info input, timetable input and of course the main landing page. It does mean a number of pages that staff or higher-access students use won't be translated, but that's an acceptable trade-off. Translating all the pages would take too long and we want it ready by the January launch. Focusing on the new student signup process means we get the most benefit for the cost.
We decided to use the mygengo online transation tool. It provides a nice interface for translators, where they can see the English terms and corresponding French translations side by side. Work is progressing slowly as translation is a lot of manual labor -- I have to go through all the HTML and extract the text into a single translation file -- but I'm making steady progress. The landing page is a bit difficult as well because of the images involved. We have to track down the original image files and generate new French ones. As for the actual text translations, my coworker is hoping to grab some students during Winter Conference this week and distribute the translation workload to have it ready by the January launch when classes start.
The pulse in French will enable our staff and students to make more use of it and have more people in DGs and discovering Jesus and growing in their faith.
