Multilingual blogs and websites
All that good stuff that everyone else is talking about, but in two or more languages simultaneously! Who is doing multilingual blogs or sites? What's easy and what's hard? This is a proposed topic for MooseCamp2008, part of NorthernVoice2008.
What
Possible topics:
- Examples: who's doing it in multiple languages, and how well?
- Value: who needs multiple languages and what for?
- Structure: how to link content in one language to another?
- Content: is content in various languages the same or different? How/why different?
- Tools: how to make your blogging system or service or CMS handle the text and connect to your translators?
- Translation: how to get the content from one language to the other?
- Process: how to make all the parts move together and on time?
When
Not sure yet. Check back here, or ask me on Friday at 10:00.
Who
People who expressed interest, or should be there:
- Jim DeLaHunt
- Richard Eriksson - once considered blogging in French & Chinese (in order to re-learn both)
- (you)
Unedited notes:
Multi-lingual websites
Alan Levine - Spanish speaking Drupal sites
Lauren Wood - speak another language, maybe I should do something about that on my blog
Michele Glave - Canadian tourism center - trying to convince us to disseminate our information on a blog (French and
English)
Christine - web design co - RFP for a big project in Cantonese
Jennifer - UBC learning technologist, explore if courses can be delivered to other countries - pilot in Beijing -
Richard Erickson - Rain City Studios, work with Drupal, new translation engine server, speak and read French, speak a
little Chinese
Sarah Fenn - Riptown media, major client in entertainment expanding around the world. going to need content in many
languages
Scott McCullen, web dev at UBC, worked on multilingual sites for Fed government, use Drupal and their translation
features
Allison Wong - also web dev at UBC, personally blog in two languages, do my own hack
Angus Pratt- freelance pixel mechanic, come at it w/o developer background, but MBA background. Org behavior and social
culture, number of project run into Drupal translation engine. Curious about interface between multilingual
blogs/websites
Ducky Sherwood - that's my favorite husband
Rob Cottingham, Social Signal, help orgs build online communities, especially interested in things like workflow, how mch
content has to be translated, how much community can do and how you decide
Monique, social media consultant with work industries - clients with customers around world, different translation needs,
my job is about structure and contant to han
Natasha Scott - Social Signal, have done a few sites in Drupal, sturgg
Horst Mann - one of my first blogs in 2 languages, went by the comments and all of a sudden didn't get much response in
one language, so assumed I should not do that and went to one language. What language I dropped I got "are you dropping
us."
Nancy White - Work
Afsona Sharif - instr course deve, UBS, accessibility, useing blogs for course content, see what others are doing
Possible Agenda
Topics - examples and values
Structure
Content
Tools - Drupal and multilingual CMS
Translation - hired translators, community translation
PRocess - process from a project management
Politics
Good examples/sites
climbtothestars - English and French blog - has summary of article in the other language
bankofcanada - publish in 2 languages - exactly same content at same instant
delicious tag - multilingual blogger
Beverly Trayner
www.ciaris.org
Wikipedia
wikitravel (what to do when entries don't match across languages)
pop montreal
global voices
Joi Ito
Do you blend your langauges or keep them on separate blogs
Suw Charman
Diego Leal
So much of what is not written in your language is hidden from you and you can't search for it
Tags as language bridges
What structure works best? Are there best practices for how you structure language one and language two and how they
cross between.
Does your url tell you the language of your content -
can put language information in the top level domain (google.jp) - gives an idea of what the UI is going to present
put language code in URL wikitravel.org/fr
Joomla add on to have a URL with no language indicator, guess a language then redirect you to a url with a languag
eindicator
Look for a cookie, offer a menu or guess from IP address
How do we sort out which Spanish we do
On process side - have people do translation, monitor our RSS feed and ask them to automatically translate certain feeds.
The magic Drupal box will enable us to do that
Paid translators
www.dotsub.com
machine translation - google translate
hummingbirdtranslations.com in Vancouver - she has a collective of translators she works with - great rates
Localization services - usually have a network of translators
using a network of people who can IM to help with specific bits of translation, especially when local context is
important
If you have money, you hire translation from the start, if none, you get the community to translate or not and set up
islands of language
Language also has a national context - what are the unstated assumptions about where you are likely to be given based on
language (setting browser interface to German, don't necc want to be pointed to stores that are only in German)
Tourism sites will offer content in many languages with specific geography
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