To Take The Forum Truly Global - Multi-Language Fully Accessible... Thoughts?

[anthony]

The 52 languages Google support are:

Afrikaans
Albanian
Arabic
Belarusian
Bulgarian
Catalan
Chinese
Croatian
Czech Danish
Dutch
English
Estonian
Filipino
Finnish
French
Galician
German Greek
Haitian Creole
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Icelandic
Indonesian
Irish
Italian Japanese
Korean
Latvian
Lithuanian
Macedonian
Malay
Maltese
Norwegian
Persian Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Swahili Swedish
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese
Welsh
Yiddish

 

[anthony]

Oh... and Google have 181 country / language specific search engines. Part of the reason to only introduce one country and progress slowly, is because I do not know what implications it would have on traffic, thus the servers ability to cope vs. having to upgrade (cost) again years ahead of my own expectations.

 

[Cin]

Is there a way to find out the most common language out of that list? As in which language is adopted in more countries? Besides English.

 

[AthenaErdmann]

Just saw this, and it is a really fascinating idea and a great initiative. I do translating professionally, and what I have learned from experience and from colleagues - much of it on a popular translator site, which is for the most part open for anyone to read (proz dot com) - makes me worry that the tone of a post and especially idioms may not translate well automatically. That can become an issue as we are so often talking about feelings here. I think we need to approach this with some humility and be prepared that something may go wrong also psychologically, not just technically.

Is there a way to safely roll back to English only, if something goes wrong really seriously?

Also, could we have a poll as to which languages could be tested first? IMO they should be languages that several active people are interested in following / supporting socially. That would likely lead to big languages first, such as Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, French, Hindi, Russian or Swahili (but who knows, maybe we have many Gaeilge speakers here, or a large group of people with roots in Iceland?). At the same time it would be important to test early at least one language with a non-Latin alphabet (Russian, anyone? or Greek?), and at least one language with a basically Latin alphabet, which is not a Germanic language (any Turks, Hungarians or Estonians here?).

I can volunteer to test the user interface in Swedish, Finnish, German and French. In the future I would be sure to post and read in English, Swedish and Finnish, and I would also take a look at posts in German and French from time to time. I also understand some Spanish and Dutch, if that is any help (but I cannot post in them myself, I just read an listen a bit).

When we know what the first languages are and have some experience of using them, it should be possible to find relevant sites in those languages and inform about this new possibility, and thus hopefully speed up the testing and make it more effective and comprehensive.

Which software are we talking about, BTW? (just curious)

Athena

 

[anthony]

The software is a plugin that utilises Google translate. It takes a copy of the entire database post tables, translates them, stores them in their own unique table and then you choose your default language. That is then the language you view the forum in. You can flick languages at the click of a mouse to read in any of the 52 languages. Each translated version is then fed to the specific search engines that use the language.

I think it will be interesting for us all...