Monday, 18 September 2006
Simpy Internationalization 
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Two weeks ago, I pointed out an engineering position at Furl, a service similar to Simpy. I also offered hacking opportunities to people passionate about the type of work that Simpy does. I'm happy to say that a few people expressed their interest in helping, and I hope that we get something going in weeks and months to come.
There is another area where volunteer help would be greatly appreciated. Simpy could really use some help with internationalization/translation to non-English languages. Currently, there is an English version, and a Croatian version. The switch to the appropriate translation happens auto-magically (browser's Accept-Language headers are the key here). English is clearly still the dominant language on the Web, but I would love for Simpy to be available in other languages - not everyone speaks English.
So, I'm looking for volunteers for translation to any language. Here is the current list of top 6 languages that Simpy visitors speak (ignore the numbers, they don't represent real traffic, although they do show relative language 'popularity'):
- 22110 en (English)
- 2327 de (German)
- 2012 pt (Portuguese)
- 1793 fr (French)
- 1765 es (Spanish)
- 1465 zh (Chinese)
Posted by at 9:23 AM in /
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Comments on this entry:
I recently spent some time thinking about how to internationalize popular (English dominated) sites. My native tongue is German and I spent a lot of time on English web sites. Many of my friends don't. The "German web" is big enough. Any popular English site has at least one (not so famous) German counterpart. When you are interested in particular topic (which is of a global nature such as programming), you'll find more (and often) better sites when searching for English keywords. However the internet is not only about facts, it's (supposed to be) "social", entertaining, where what's best is hard to say anyways (maybe switch off the computer).
In both cases, facts and fun, most people prefer using the language they know best. However, of course, you don't want to limit yourself to information written one language or people understanding your language. (There aren't that many German speakers in the universe.) So, eventually, most people will use a mixture, and everyone has his own set of accepted languages. An international site has to cope with that.
Let's talk about simpy: Translating some English strings into German wouldn't be to hard to do. However it would be of little help, I think it would even confuse people. (When I'm seeing a German search box I'm tempted to punch in a German query. No results. Ooops.) We need something like "prefer German sites" (tag "de", "DE", "German", "Germany", "Austria" or domains .at,.de,.ch or lang header in html (hardly used) or ...). This requires some cooperation from simpy users (if you bookmark a site which offers translation, use language tags). Next, what are we doing with tags? Using English tags for pages not available in English by people who don't speak English, is not the way to go. However using German tags means I need two queries. Think about it, I can't offer a solution right now.
Don't be too auto-magically. The idea is good but the implementation is usually not (try google from a foreign internet cafe). Auto-Magic (I like this term) is hell for people who speak many languages. Use accept-language headers and (maybe) regional IP address ranges as a first guess, but allow users to overwrite it! (Do you want to deal with support requests quoting German or Chinese error messages?)
Jan:
Good point in this last paragraph about error messages. German error messages I could handle, Chinese I can easily get help with, but yes, "it's not scalable".
However, you are mostly talking about language-aware tagging of sites people bookmark in Simpy. I'm not talking about that, although that's an interesting topic for a different discussion. Personally, I feel that trying to get a diverse group of people to agree on some "rules" or practices is utopian.
So, here I am really only talking about translating Simpy's user interface to other languages so that it is easier for an individual to use the Simpy service for him/herself. That is achievable with a little translation. Let me know if you are interested in helping with that.
Tagging or even system/auto-tagging links with ISO 639 language codes (c.f. http://vancouver-webpages.com/multilingual/iso639a.txt), is an interesting idea. Simpy does have support for language identification for a number of languages, even though that may not be exposed in the UI at the moment.
Otis,
Don't forget that you don't have an English version, you have a US English version.
Your post title illustrates the issue well - "Simpy Internationalization" (US) vs. "Simpy Internationalisation" (UK) :-)
Keep up the good work.
Cheers,
Paul
Paul:
Yeah (US English!), I know. I'm also secretly working on an Aussie, NZ, and Canadian versions, eh?
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