All the menus and messages used in the programs must be translated into Khmer, so that everything that a user will see in his computer will be in Khmer language. The basic effort is evaluated on the translation of about 50.000 messages, each one of which can be from a single word to five lines of text.

Translations will be done in the order established by the project plan. This module could be separated in several sub-modules, in order to create clear project milestones (the same could be applied to the translation of manuals).

The translation of software comes down to translate the messages displayed by the software package. The following number of messages needs to be translated for each one of the applications.

Each message can be anything from one word to 5 lines of text, but the average message will probably be of about five o six words.

 Every message will be translated by one person and checked by another one, the message checker should tend to be a computer scientist. For the goals of these project translators and computer scientists will be considered alike.

 In order to estimate the necessary resources, our original estimates considered that a translator could translate around 60 messages a day (five hours of productive work, one message every five minutes), and check another 60 that have been translated by another translator (one more hour of effective work). To be realistic, the number was brought down be of 50 messages a day.

Now our experience is dictating that experienced translators can do at least 100 messages a day, and correct as many.

 If a translator works 220 days in a year, the number of messages per translator/year will be of 22.000 messages. Considering a small overhead, the project needs 3 full time translators/year for the message related part.

Please check the status page on work related to Software Translation

Page Last Updated: Friday, 22 October 2004

For any comments on the web, please contact the wembaster of this domain