KMFasTrans is a management tool to greatly boost efficiency and effectiveness in the creation of multi-language websites under Joomla!. For this it relies on native multi-language functions in Joomla!, but it greatly reduces the effort required to achieve it thanks to its rich functionality.

The most important characteristics are briefly described below:

Translations Set concept

The translations set concept is analogous to that of a file cabinet with a folder containing a text in the source language of translations, and a folder for each target language containing the translation of the text in the folder of the source language. Thus, the set of translations contains the original text and all its translations.

When you translate content into several languages in Joomla!, what you are doing is creating a different item for each language. Each item is assigned to a language and has the same content (translated) that another item in another language. For example, suppose you have a website with three languages, English, French and Spanish. For each content (category, menu, banner, article ..) you have to create three items, one for English, one for French and one for Spanish. And these three elements are related and have many things in common, and here is where KMFasTrans comes to help.

In KMFasTrans we created the concept of Set of Translations (or Translations Set). A Set of Translations is the set of items representing the same content in different languages. In the example above, if the items have the id's 10 for English, 23 for French and 31 for Spanish, you will have a Translations Set composed of items whose id's are 10, 23 and 31. The items with ids 23 and 31, which are translations of the item with id 10, that is the source item, are called translation items.

Each Translations Set has several attributes. One of the most important attributes is the Status, indicating whether they have done all the translations of the same content, whether or not they are all published, and if there have been any changes since the last publication.

To find translations already made and their status, you have the view "Translations Dashboard" where all the information of all translations of a particular item or element type is in sight. From this view you can make changes to the sets of translations, by associating, disassociating or changing items of the Set, or changing the Set Status. You can also publish, unpublish or trash any of the items whether they are or not assigned to a Set. For a more detailed description see the KMFasTrans Dashboard Help.

An example of the content of a set of translations is shown below:

To learn more about this topic visit Translation Sets

Boosting effectiveness and efficiency

Creating/Editing items

Another aspect that KMFasTrans will help you enormously is on creating or editing translations items. First of all you must know that to create or edit a translation item with KMFasTrans, you must have created in advance, using the native Joomla!, one item (and preferably only one), whose language will be the Source Language for the translation.

Following the previous example of a website in three languages, English, French and Spanish, the most efficient sequence of tasks would be to create the entire site first in one language, eg English, and then use KMFasTrans to translate each content (categories, articles, ...) into the other languages. The most efficient sequence to create items in the source language, and also to make the translations is as follows:

Categories, Field Groups, Fields, Tags, Embedded Modules in articles, Articles, Banners, Contacts, Newsfeeds, Weblinks and then Menus and Menu items and the remaining Modules. 

An alternative may be to create each item first in the source language and then in all the others, in the same sequence indicated above. For example we can create a category in the source language and then create all its translation categories to the target languages.

Once we are satisfied with the content in the source language we can start to create translations.

When you create an item as a translation of another one using KMFasTrans, the new item created in one of the target languages inherit some attributes of the original item, such as the type. To facilitate the creation of the new item, KMFasTrans provides several tools to copy the item parameter values from the source item to the target item (ie, cloning the item). These copy tools allow you to copy all non-language dependent values. For example, if you are creating an article, its category is language dependent because it will not be the category of the original article but a translation into the target language. The following image illustrates these tools:

KMFasTrans will also help you with the language dependent parameters, because it will automatically filter all language-dependent values. In the above example, if you are creating a new article, the drop-down list of categories that the new article may belong to, will only show those that are in the same language in which you are creating the new article (or the language '*'). And the same applies to all drop-down lists. This way you do not have to worry about ensuring that an item is in a category of their own language, avoiding mistakes and wasted time. The following image illustrates this:

Translations suggestions.

One of the characteristics that provide greater efficiency in the creation of translations is the use of known translations to populate the language-dependent fields. For example if you are translating a menu item of type 'Single Article' from English to French, and a French translation of the article is known (it was created erlier) , the 'Select Article' field in the French menu item will be automatically populated with the translation of the article into French. Thus saving the time to search the article and also avoiding possible mistakes. The same applies for any language-dependent field of any element type (articles, modules, menus, etc.). The following image illustrates this:

Machine translations.

KMFasTrans, also provides support for content translation using a 'translation Service'. When creating or editing an item, you will see in certain fields of the edit form, a button . Pressing this button, the content of the field or fields is populated with the translation of the content of the original field. For example, if you are translating an article from English to French, when you press on the Title of the article in French, it will be filled in with the French translation of the title of the article in English.

There are several possibilities to do the machine translations as you can see in the following image:

To learn more about this topic visit Enable Machine Translation service, Create Translation Tags and Create Translation Process.

Automatic items associations.

Another important aspect is the association of items. If you want (as usual) to view the translation of the current page when you switch the language in the front end, it is necessary that the menu item that leads to the page in one language, be associated with the menu item that leads to the page in the other language. When the number of languages or menu items is high, the manual association of each menu item, can be very time consuming. But with KMFasTrans this is done automatically. Each time you create a new item with KMFasTrans, automatically you associate the new menu item to those who belong to the same set of translations. No omissions or mistakes.

The same is true when you associate/dissociate elements to/from a set of translations, the Joomla item associations are also created or modified to reflect the changes in the set. And it also works in the opposite direction, changes made to Joomla item associations will be automatically reflected in KMFasTrans sets of translations.

There is also an option that allows you to launch a processs that will create, edit or delete sets of translations using the current Joomla menu associations and also the opposite, create, edit or delete Joomla item associations using the current sets of translations.

Creating translations into several languages at once

A very important feature to improve efficiency is the possibility of creating several translations at once. From the Translations Management Dashboard window it is possible to load in the KMFasTrans editing window several empty forms for the creation of several translation elements at the same time, for example the article translations of an original article to several target languages. In this way, with only three clicks, 'Copy All', 'Translate All' and 'Save', we can create translations in all the languages we want. The following image illustrates this functionality:

In the upper left corner you can see a list of languages to be saved, which means that the modifications made to the items in those languages will be saved. Only items that have had modifications will have their language checked in that language list. In this example, when you click on the button 'Save' or 'Save & Close', the translations of the menu item 'Compact List of tagged items' in English language, will be created in Dutch, French, German, Italian and Spanish languages. And all at once!.

Guaranteed quality of the multilanguage structure thanks to the consistency checking process

KMFasTrans PRO introduces a new concept in the process of translating a website that we have called 'inconsistencies'. The purpose of this feature is to detect potential mistakes that can occur when creating a multi-language site.
A website that does not contain inconsistencies provides the guarantee that all that has been translated is consistent and will have the same behavior in any language.

 Below is an example of inconsistencies. To learn more about this topic visit Deal with inconsistencies.

Improved security with language specific permissions.

Last but not least, KMFasTrans, provides permissions to the language level. If you have different people doing translations into different languages, you can create groups of translators with limited access to certain languages. For example, a group of translators can handle the translation into French. The components of this group can see all the translations into other languages, but can only perform the actions that they are allowed in each language. To learn more about this topic visit Permissions Management.

All this will help you be more efficient in your translation tasks and maintain all your translations under absolute control.