museumsandtheweb.com - Comments for "Multi-lingual Web 2.0 experience?"

Multilingual web is a Unicode issue - not specific to web 2.0

adavidow — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 01:53:29 +0000

Other than confusion in tagging, I don't see how dealing with multiple languages is necessarily a web 2.0 issue - it is very much a Unicode issue, and obviously, there are lots of i8l issues in general—you could, for instance, set up your site with sets of data for each of the languages you want to support, and provide the likely set based on the default encoding of the browser. How you choose to support that (or what affordances are available in a specific programming/scripting language or framework) is where you need to focus. In my own websites, I tend not to have translations—I put up pages using the language/alphabet/support css needed for that specific page or page block—and have the freedom to move on. If you are working on pages other than your personal site, you probably don't have the freedom to be quite so cavalier ;-).

Last summer I did a lot of work with Unicode and Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish on the web. I wrote up what I learned here: http://www.ivritype.com/hebrew/2005/08/trying_for_unic.php

Hope it is useful to others.

Well I was nearly right

DavidGerrard — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 17:37:40 +0000

OK- so I missed 113 of them! Oops!

Other multi-lingual issues: process, logistics, etc.

brian_dawson — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 06:02:56 +0000

Thanks for the comments! Speaking from my more immediate or short-term needs for a moment, my interests are English/French bilingual implementations, which from a technology perspective I would expect are much simpler "roman" scenarios (not to discourage broader discussion of the subject!)

Still, I haven't seen examples of how folks make bi/multi-lingual implementations work. How can the multiple languages be managed? Are they the same site or separate sites? A common social stream or separate pools of comments and interactions? Do the experts (or moderators/admins) translate their contributions, or do they post them in just one language at a time, regardless of the language of the audience(s). Do they duplicate posts in separate streams??

Some organizations have it easy: for example, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation runs very separate English and French sites (CBC vs. Radio-Canada). Other Canadian Federal cultural institutions don't have it so "easy," and not just for budgitary reasons. There is a potentially complex dynamic of carrying on a multi-lingual discourse in an on-line community, and I'm very keen to hear and see if anyone has made it work or has ideas....!

BRIAN.

Wikipedia is more diverse than that

twidale — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 00:56:55 +0000

"Wikipedia encompasses 123 "active" language editions (100+ articles) as of January 2006."

I looked that up on Wikipedia, so it must be true :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Language_ed...

Er... Wikipedia?

DavidGerrard — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 22:19:24 +0000

There are ten languages and one implementation in a non-Roman character set. http://www.wikipedia.org

multi-lingual

dgreenfield — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 22:05:46 +0000

Your questions are interesting. It kind of depends on what languages you are thinking about. With most western text it should not be a problem, but with other systems (Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, Finnish, Greek, Japanese, etc) there are other issues. I am currently doing an independent study class for school in which I am examining these issues. The answers are related to the use of XML and CSS, but I do not know enough about it now to provide any specifics. I will be happy to pass on the information as I learn. It also seems to be that the answers will provide information about how to integrate these languages into a blog or web site.