18
votes
Are we ready for internationalization (i18n)?
Asking this early on because it's hard to implement as an after-thought. Will Tildes be ready to integrate interface translations maybe with the help of its community?
Asking this early on because it's hard to implement as an after-thought. Will Tildes be ready to integrate interface translations maybe with the help of its community?
Some experience as a non-native English speaker. I never switch a site's or a program's language. Most of the help on the internet will probably be in the site's/program's native language, and it's often not immediately obvious, how to map it to your native language. I also actively dislike when a site forces me to use my native language. One of the worst offenders is Google search, which points me to the Russian versions of articles on, say, MDN, which are almost always lagging behind their English counterparts, so instead of reading the content I have to waste time switching it back to English.
TL;DR: If you're doing i18n, go full in, all the time, or don't at all. No "Sorry, this content is not translated yet." crap.
Google in English with US results, bookmark it or set it as your homepage. Also add
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&gl=us&gws_rd=cr&hl=en&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8as your custom search engine (paste it in chrome://settings/searchEngines and set it as default).If you are a Firefox adding a custom search engine is more complex and requires creating an xml file, I can upload it somewhere if you need it.
Setting google up so it searches in English and in the international (or US) version as opposed to the local one is a complete pain in the ass. I don't know why they have to make it so difficult (advertising maybe?).
That's a possibility I haven't considered, I doubt they can profit from you seeing ads targeted at a different country, you are less likely to click them.
Another annoying offender is IMDb, which insists on displaying certain titles (only certain titles, completely randomly it seems) on the local language (from the IP, not the film's nationality), even though they're supposed to be showing them only in English as per the site's settings.
Oh yes and then you are forced to look at all those translated abominations from your country. Makes me cringe.
Not specifically about internationalization of the interface but related and still worth noting:
https://docs.tildes.net/faq#does-tildes-allow-non-english-communities
I agree whatever @ainar-g says, bad i18n is worse than no i18n. Personally I almost always use English versions of software and websites unless their first language is a language I can read. BTW (cc @macadoum) I don't think i18n is necessary for discussion in languages other than English, the interface can remain English, discussion can be in any language.
That said, if i18n is going to happen, I would gladly help with Turkish translations, which is my native tongue. I can also help check Italian, but I wouldn't risk translating if there are native speakers here. I can't promise moderating content in these languages though, I could help occasionally when I have free time but I cannot allocate time for it regularly.
I don't really see the point. Tildes content and comments are in English. And its existence was mostly announced on English speaking sites. So I'd wager everyone who ended up on Tildes and managed to get an account is a fluent English speaker. And there's no content in any other language. So why would we have the interface in a different language?
I agree internationalization sould be taken into consideration early. I'll probably be more active on Tildes if I could speak with others in my own language rather than english which i'm not very fluent with. I think for now implementing i18n will be much less painless than in the future. Maybe we can just start by translatting the interface as a first step ?
Of course, I could help to translate it into my own language or help to moderate internationalized groups.
I really enjoy the community around the english language here and when it was like that on reddit. It made me feel part of something different and I don't know...global in a local sense. I loved getting away from my native tongue and not seeing it and (possibly) not even talk to any of my countrymen. After reddit became widely popular my language creeped in all over the place and suddenly it was just like facebook in some sense and it lost something in my book. Of course it's a completely different experience for Americans but maybe some will understand. The solution for me on reddit is to disappear into smaller communities where the anonymity is still present and I would hope I shouldn't have to do that here some day.
Not sure what you speak, but I believe you can post and response in quite a few languages here. Of course that's not to say there'll be enough of an audience at the moment to share that with you.
Edit to add old thread: Let's speak in foreign (non-English) languages!.
See @cfabbro's comment further up for details, but basically for now you can only comment/post in English. The thread you linked is really the exception to the rule.
"primarily" is a pretty key word in that section of the FAQ, IMO. AFAIK there is no rule strictly prohibiting foreign language use on the site, hence why that topic @catt references was left up and not removed... but it just makes it difficult to monitor the site when Deimos and everyone helping him doesn't speak a language, so languages other than English aren't officially supported or generally encouraged (yet).
I had to reread that. I skimmed it originally and thought it was more about we're not creating new groups and such, but yeah, sounds like we don't yet want foreign language posts/comments either.
Since there is no way to translate user submitted content I don't see a path forward that actually betters UX