Adobe Experience Manager, now has a well define API for integrating a Translation Platform. A number of Translation Partners have leveraged this support and built connectors. The connectors allow AEM instances to connect to Translation Platform and send content from AEM over to Translation Platform and back in AEM.

AEM supports two kinds of translation workflows – synchronous translation (machine translation) and asynchronous translation (human translation). A connector can choose to implement either of the workflows or can support both workflows. AEM’s success has attracted a number of translation vendors to write a connector and make it available to their customers. Hence there is a good chance that you can grab a connector off the shelf without going through the pain of developing one itself.

Most translation partners have also shared their connectors on the Adobe Marketing Exchange. Here is a quick link to the list of translation vendors as of today (Thursday, July 7th, 2016)

#	Translation Vendor	Learn More	Download Connector
1	Smartling	LearnMore – Smartling	Connector
2	SDL WorldServer	LearnMore – SDL-WordServer	Connector
3	SDL TMS	LearnMore-SDL-TMS	Connector
4	Translations.com (GlobalLink Connect)	LearnMore-TDC-Globallink-AEM	Connector
5	LionBridge (Clay – Tablet)	LearnMore-LionBridge	Does not share connector on Package Share
6	LingoTek	LearnMore-Lingotek-AEM	Connector
7	Thebigword	LearnMore-TheBigWord-AEM	Conector
8	Cloudwords	LearnMore-CloudWords-AEM	Connector
9	X-Connect	LearnMore-XConnect-AEM	Does not share connector on Package Share
10	Systran (Machine Translation)	LearnMore-Systran-AEM	Connector
11	AltLang (Machine Translation)	LearnMore-AltLang-AEM	Connector
12	GCell XLIFF Connector (not real translation	LearnMore-GCellXliff	Connector

You can see the current list by clicking this link (the link will redirect to Adobe Marketing Exchange):

https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/content/resources/en/exchange/marketplace/aem.html?q=translation&cat=aem&lastQuery=&orderBy=

However, if you have valid reasons to develop one of your own, you should start from a bootstrap connector. Bootstrap connector, as the name suggests is a shell project that you can use to develop a translation connector. Here are some useful links:

Source Code:

GIT: https://github.com/Adobe-Marketing-Cloud/aem-translation-framework-bootstrap-connector

Documentation:

API:https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/aem/6-2/develop/ref/javadoc/com/adobe/granite/translation/api/package-summary.html

Documentation: https://helpx.adobe.com/experience-manager/using/bootstrap.html

As always, if you need any help in developing a connector, do not hesitate to reach out to us (see my contact info below). We have extensive experience in developing connectors and have developed multiple connectors including the Microsoft Translator connector that ships with AEM. We would love to help you build your connector.

Gaurav Garg

gaurav@experiencelabs.in

Does this question seem familiar – should we use Language Copy or Live Copy? From experience, I can tell you that every AEM customer does ask this question, not once but multiple times during AEM adoption. My colleague Praffull is writing this series of blogs about Site Structures. Today while having lunch, we were discussing about the next Blog post. It occurred to me that we need to talk about Language Copy and Live Copy first before anyone starts thinking about Site structure. So here is my contribution to Praffull’s efforts.

Adobe has described the these two concepts in the AEM documentation quite clearly.

Live Copy: A live copy is a copy of specific site content for which a live relationship with the original source is maintained. The live copy inherits content from its source; synchronization performs the actual transfer of content. Prime use case is to reuse content at multiple locations. One very good example of the usage of Live Copy is for sharing the content on multiple sub-sites – example Car Dealership Sites.

Language Copy: A language copy is a copy of an existing site that is to be translated to another language. There is no live relationship as established in case of Live Copy. It is one time copy of the content. Please note, there is no translation as part of the Language Copy Creation. However, Language Copy should be used if you wish to translate the content eventually. You may chose to partially translate the content. Thumb rule: create Language Copies if you intend to translate content.

There is a common myth – Language Copies can’t be updated/synchronised. After reading the documentation most AEM users think that if they have to synchronize content between two sites, they must use Live Copy. However, that is not the case. The decision for using Live Copy vs. Language Copy should be based on whether you are going to translate content or not. If you do wish to translate content, then please evaluate using Language Copy instead. Language Copies can be updated as well and synchronized with their source. AEM has Update & Translate workflows available Out of the box that can synchronize changes between the source and language copy. However, in order to use these workflows, one needs to structure the content in a way that language roots (pages with ISO locale code) are all at the same level.

I and Praffull will be happy to discuss with you if you have any follow up questions or want to discuss your Site Structure. Please do not hesitate to write to me at gaurav@experiencelabs.in

 

Heard of Adobe Sightly??

Welcome to Adobe’s new AEM 6 Sightly framework!  Sightly is the new templating engine in AEM and is meant to replace JSP and ESP templating engine for AEM 6. Among the great improvements in the technology stack (like new OAK repository) it also introduces a new way of component development.

With Sightly, Adobe presents a more readable, maintainable, and secure code, while distinctly separating the logic and markup. Sightly is attempting to address the most common problems found in the existing foundation and sample reference code, e.g. the lack of separation of concerns between business and presentation logic and the sloppy use of scriplets.

Why Sightly:

 

Below is the feature comparison of Sightly vs Handlebar vs JSP:

Table 1: A comparative analysis of Sightly over JSP and Handlebar:

	Sightly	Handlebar	JSP
Basic logic permissions	Y	Y+++	Y
Open source/based on published standards	Y	Y	Y+
Officially supported/documented	Y	Y	Y
IDE support	Y	N	Y
Extension model documented	N	N	Y
XSS escaping included	Y	N	Y++
Enables Bad coding practices	N	N	Y

+ Proprietary Tag libraries
++ Additional tag libraries
+++ Very limited support

Reference links

[0] https://github.com/Adobe-Marketing-Cloud/sightly-spec/blob/master/SPECIFICATION.md

[1] https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/aem/6-0/develop/sightly.html

Hello !

Interested to learn to deploy and manage AEM systems at scale and how you can take advantage of MongoDB to deploy a highly scalable content repository to support your business needs??

The 4 week long course covers the following:

Week 1: Getting Started with AEM and MongoDB
Week 3: AEM Data Model and Basic Setup
Week 2: Deployment and Operational Concerns
Week 4: Class Project

Link for registration:

https://university.mongodb.com/courses/M212/about

Happy Learning !!

Great to see the work from Gcell developers get published in the January edition of the Multilingual Magazine “Adobe announces XLIFF 2.0 connector for Adobe Experience Manager to boost localization capabilities”:

http://dig.multilingual.com/20160102/#?page=10

Many thanks to Adobe for acknowledging the efforts of Gcell engineers!!

We are proud of the achievement, Thanks Adobe!!

Super excited to announce that we now have our XLIFF connector available on Adobe marketing page:

https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/content/resources/en/exchange/marketplace/apps/gcell-xliff-export-connector.html

To summarise, this connector opens the doors for connecting AEM6.1 to an XLIFF based translation engine, integrates with OKAPI framework, thus creating a powerful solution for managing multilingual content. The connector supports  the most recent XLIFF version2.0 and the previous version1.2

Congratulations to our great AEM Engineers and thanks to Adobe for all the support extended!! And yes, this is only the first of the series…Many more to follow!!