Greetings, Folks.

We are currently working on a major overhaul of our site, and I am also trying to give our international visitors additional ways to get as much information about our events as I can. About a year ago, I started a translation project, aiming to make most of our site available in several different languages, but, I must admit, that task has proven to be much complicated then I had expected.

Which is why we are now starting with a rather different approach. What I want to achieve is the following.

All the navigational elements, our main and private menus, and such, are generated by our XOOPS software and should (and will) be available in many different languages.

The announcements of our scheduled events, accessible through the "Oriental Magic" and "Magical Tribal" options of our Main Menu, will be available both in Dutch and English, controlled by selecting the appropriate flag of our Language Box.

The remainder of our site, including all our forum messages, are available in English by using the "Translate our site to English" link in the Google Translate Box of our Home Page. This option will redirect our Home Page to Google Translate, and from within that translated Home Page, you can access all the public content of our site in the English language.

To be sure, this is an automated translation, and it is still rather crude, but it should be enough to get an impression of what we Dutch folks are talking about. If something isn't clear, or you just want to reply on some matters, please use this International Forum, dedicated to our English users.

There are still some technical issues I have to solve, the most important is how to prevent Google Translate to process pages which, like this post, are originally written in English. And I still want to support many other languages, so I have to figure out a way to do a double translation, first from Dutch to English, and then, from English to German or French.

Anyway, I think the genius minds currently working with Google won't mind if we try to help them, it's a really great idea they have about how to use self-learning software to improve the quality of the translations, I notified the folks at Google of this experiment, and we have permission to use their logo, so all of that legal stuff is also taken care of.

Please, give it a try, and let me know if it works.

Take care,
Simon