Greetings from PTCFast.com. We hope everyone is having a good summer.
PTCFast.com is happy to announce an important upgrade that will be of special interest for many users in the United States: Spanish translation for parents. As with most of our upgrades, this is a direct response to dozens of requests we have received from users.
At the bottom of the Manage Conference page, check the box next to “Turn on Spanish translation option for parent communication”.
When you pick this option, pages used by parents will display a US and Spanish flag in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. When a parent clicks on the Spanish flag, the system will switch over to displaying screens in Spanish (in this session and in any subsequent sessions and emails). Parents can switch back to English (and vice versa) at any time.
To insure fully translated emails and displays, you will need to provide a Spanish version of the language you have “customized” for your conference, such as location, special greeting, and so forth.
All the customized-text fields that require translation are marked with a little note below the text box that reads: “Translation text: ‘English##Spanish’“ (you only see this little note if you have selected Spanish Translation checkbox.)
For example, one such field is Location on the Emails page. If your English text were to say “Room 232 in the main building”, you could instead insert “Room 232 in the main building##Habitación 232 en el edificio principal”. Parents who self-select Spanish would then see “Habitación 232 en el edificio principal”, everyone else would see “Room 232 in the main building”.
There are only seven fields that allow you to add a translation: four on Emails, (Location, What to tell users without internet, Final sentence, and Who letters are from), one on Reports/Deadlines (What to tell parents if all appointments are taken), and two on Manage Conference (Special Requests note, and Intro to the School Web Page note (if chosen.))
Note: you are not required to provide a Spanish translation of all seven of these elements. If you only provide English in some of them, that English text will be displayed to everyone, which might be perfectly adequate for your purposes. Also, note that if you uncheck the Spanish Translation Option, the any text you have entered (separated out by ##s) will still be there in the text box but will not be displayed to parents, so you wouldn’t have to go and edit it out.
We are looking forward to user comments on this new feature.