Translating corporate pages into a foreign language is a popular request from many website owners. Website localisation is considered to be a rather complicated procedure that has a lot of nuances.

One of the key issues is exporting the text part of the website. It is the transfer of an information array is considered a primary and more important task than even proofreading the texts by a native speaker, debugging the interface and functional elements of the pages.

You should be aware that modern websites do not have textual information directly on the pages. Most of them retrieve information from databases, and the rest is generated by the user’s own queries. This is why text exporting is often a problem for translation agency clients.

The most popular option is linking a website in a programming language with a mySQL database extension. It is now the most common way to store information on the Internet.

In the databases each text is located under a unique identifier. It is obligatory to move the content of the site together with them. Otherwise, each subsequent import process will be more difficult, and sometimes even impossible.

Many ISPs and hosting companies offer a free service for accessing site databases — phpmyadmin.

Before exporting documents, you need to know which tables include the texts of the resource pages, and what is responsible for the service and additional elements. By the way, the site menu, drop-down lists can be placed in several tables.

After gaining access to the database platform specialist can export the fields of text tables in the format sql, xls, or other user-friendly, so that it can be easily reproduced by a text editor. To do this, the «Export» tab must be used.

The fact that a lot of unnecessary data will get into the snapshot of computer system information is not so critical. Our editors work on a special platform which highlights only the important points. The specialist eye is not tired and does not focus on unnecessary information. It is highlighted fragments are taken into account by a manager when preparing an estimate for the site.

It is worth bearing in mind that some firms provide administrative access to the database site with rights assigned to each. The platform does not give full access, but allows only certain commands, such as export. In such a situation it is possible to dump the content of the platform yourself (a snapshot of the information on the page). You will need the address of the administrative part of the site, a login and a password.

The process of dumping is quite complicated, so all the details will not fit into one material. The only thing worth noting is that after all the stages of translation the dump has to be imported back into the database of the resource.