For a long time I have wondered how popular our site might be amongst those who do not speak English. We have only made our site available in English until now. We have just released a new feature called LOTE (Languages Other Than English), which allows us to organise translators to translate fields on all pages of the site, in a gradual fashion (if there is no translation, the "fall back" is English).
You can see how this looks on the front page for German (if you have your OS language set to German, you should automatically see the page in German, BTW), and a little of Polish (because these are some of the languages we speak in our head office). In the user Control Panel, top right of most pages (EXCEPT the discussion forums!), you can see the language selector.
But the goal of this is not western-European languages (although, it's obviously possible), but to add Chinese, Japanese and perhaps some Indian languages.
We also have the option to employ Google Translate for some (or, all!) fields. We all know that Google Translate quality is low (and sometimes laughable), but as someone who only speaks English and has lived in the Netherlands for the last five years, I have found it very helpful to get the "gist" of what is going on, and I figure, that's better than nothing (well, "nothing" being English). And anyway, the majority of the "content" on the site transcends language anyway (the issue mainly is finding it).
This change affects every page of the site, and while it all seems to be working fine from our end, please do report any bugs you see. And if you speak Japanese or Chinese fluently, as well as English fluently, please drop me a line - we might have some work for you!
You can see how this looks on the front page for German (if you have your OS language set to German, you should automatically see the page in German, BTW), and a little of Polish (because these are some of the languages we speak in our head office). In the user Control Panel, top right of most pages (EXCEPT the discussion forums!), you can see the language selector.
But the goal of this is not western-European languages (although, it's obviously possible), but to add Chinese, Japanese and perhaps some Indian languages.
We also have the option to employ Google Translate for some (or, all!) fields. We all know that Google Translate quality is low (and sometimes laughable), but as someone who only speaks English and has lived in the Netherlands for the last five years, I have found it very helpful to get the "gist" of what is going on, and I figure, that's better than nothing (well, "nothing" being English). And anyway, the majority of the "content" on the site transcends language anyway (the issue mainly is finding it).
This change affects every page of the site, and while it all seems to be working fine from our end, please do report any bugs you see. And if you speak Japanese or Chinese fluently, as well as English fluently, please drop me a line - we might have some work for you!
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