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Multi-lingual Web 2.0 experience?

brian_dawson's picture
Fri, 2006-03-24 10:14 — brian_dawson
Are there successful multi-lingual implementations of "Web 2.0" tools and concepts? Many of these sets of tools encourage easy participation; however, some institutions operate under a bilingual/multi-lingual mandate, which if rigidly interpreted, could make some of these concepts more difficult to apply. Some sample issues/questions/thoughts: - Are tools and interface elements easily adaptable to multiple languages? - Can they be implemented in both languages simultaneously, with links/flows between languages? - Have sites kept language implementations separate, or allowed them to mingle (for example, are mixed blog comments encouraged in the language of the users choice)? - Do you translate your "expert" blog/forum posts (e.g. a curator's blog)? If so, does this slow down or otherwise impact the blog? I'm interested in experiences both for general public engagement and for internal institutional use.
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Fri, 2006-03-24 20:56 — twidale
twidale's picture

Wikipedia is more diverse than that

"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_editions
Sat, 2006-03-25 13:37 — DavidGerrard
DavidGerrard's picture

Well I was nearly right

OK- so I missed 113 of them! Oops!
Fri, 2006-03-24 18:05 — dgreenfield
dgreenfield's picture

multi-lingual

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.
Tue, 2006-03-28 21:53 — adavidow
adavidow's picture

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

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.
Sat, 2006-03-25 02:02 — brian_dawson
brian_dawson's picture

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

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.
Fri, 2006-03-24 18:19 — DavidGerrard
DavidGerrard's picture

Er... Wikipedia?

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

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