Bilingual family tree software?

[jimchou66]

I am a Chinese-American living in New York trying to create a small family tree for my family. Many family members are in China and Chinese-speaking only. Can anyone recommend bilingual genealogy software that would allow input in either Chinese or English from multiple sources and is hopefully free.

Thanks for any help!

[Doug 周]

You have many choices, even with the key word 'free'. See Software for Chinese Genealogy^click. If you are doing all the data entry without your relatives seeing the work except when they visit you, then there are free choices. If you want your relatives to participate, enter the data and media, and help grow the tree, then you will have to subscribe to a service or rent server space.

Let us know a tad more information so we can have a dialog

[lachinatown]

Looks like we are getting a new look.
I missed the recents tab.

[kerry]

Just to unpack your request:

When you say you're in NY and they're in China, do you intend to "share" stuff by emailing back and forwards (not recommended)? The alternative is to have it on the web somewhere where both of you can view the same data. Some of the website software that's out there will let you select different languages for the website. Unfortunately, Chinese isn't currently an offering for many including webtrees. That said, it's fairly easy to pass a URL to google translate so even my pages can be read in Chinese. (Not sure how comprehensible it is though). You can find my site (check my profile) then pass that link to goggle tranlator.

If you're a beginner, let me stress one thing: The language of the data you enter into your database is a different thing to language of the website's labels, headings and navigation buttons. Work out which fields you want to store in english and which fields should be stored in chinese. For example, many of my entries have multiple name fields - one for their chinese name and one for an english one.

On the question of "free". Good luck with that... Webtrees is free but needs to be hosted on a webserver somewhere. Webtrees is free oss and some of the developers also run hosting services.

[Doug 周]

The latest version of webtrees has an official simplified Chinese language interface (file). I don't know how good it is and how it compares to MyHeritage.com's interface. Maybe someone bilingual can comment.

[jimchou66]

Thanks Doug and Kerry. Ideally, I would need a system that will allow individual family members both in US and in China to enter their own data in either English or Chinese and translate content in both directions allowing both sides to read. I have contact with only a few generations, so the number of individuals would be less than a hundred.
Jim

[Doug 周]

Jim,

I hope you read through the software section. Since you are less than the ‘magic number’ of 300, try MyHeritage.com. Pay for any upgrade as your numbers increase. You lose some control but as you get closer to 300, then consider the option of webtrees. There are workarounds for multiple name storage discussed in the Software section.

This should get as an introduction to online genealogy for you and your relatives. Make sure you backup your photos from your relatives since there is no bulk backup nor download of your precious media from MyHeritage.com. Their goal is vendor ‘lock in’ and getting you to subscribe for perpetuity.

Give us a follow up in the Software section so others can learn from your experience.

[philiptancl]

Hi Jimchou66,

I have been using Geni.com ever since I was invited by a family member to join. Within the family group now, we have members from China and Chinese-speaking only. Whenever I invite Chinese-speaking to join, I normally switch my language choice to “Chinese” before entering their emails. Below is the list showing the locations of people within my family group who are adding in profiles, managing, etc. For the 22,000 profiles I have added so far, nearly all of them are with Chinese characters.



Philip