Halton Industry Education Council - Translation of Apprenticesearch.com

The Halton Industry Education Council (HIEC) is a non-profit organization established in 1989 to foster partnerships between industry, education, and the community in Halton.

Apprenticesearch.com has been a multi-phase project that started in 1998 with functionality added each year up to and including the current year. The purpose of the project was to develop an online forum for employers and applicants to connect with each other for the purposes of job matching. It is a large dynamic web application that provides much information on trades information and careers in the Canadian trades specific to the Ontario region. This is an interactive site that brings job seekers and employers together via the Internet. This is also a bilingual site. Appretincesearch was a winner of the Yves Landry Program of the Year award in 2002.

The success of Apprenticesearch.com led to a requirement to broaden its user base and encompass the French sector of this market.

The Project

The site was created using Active Server Pages technology, using VBScript interspersed with HTML. This methodology was suitable when supporting only one language on the site, but when the requirements changed to incorporate support for two languages, this methodology posed several problems:

Existing text was embedded within the website's logic elements, meaning there was no separation of presentation and logic.
Maintainability of content and logic was difficult to separate, requiring programming knowledge to update and translate any wording.
Translation of site could not easily be done without knowledge of VBScript and HTML.

What was required was a method to separate content and logic, which would allow for the business rules to be maintained regardless of presentation language, and allow for a translation team to focus on translating content, without programming knowledge.

The Solution

Innosphere developed an XML based solution which allowed for a pure separation of content and logic. All site content would be pulled out of logic elements and placed into XML documents. A simple lookup function would display the user's chosen language.

This result was a new French and English bilingual website with the following benefits:

Maintainable at a lower cost than multiple sites with redundant logic.
Scalable to the addition of new languages and functionality within the existing site and structure.
Maintainable by "language" specialists, rather than "programming" specialists.