Details
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Type:
New Feature
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Status: To-Do (View Workflow)
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Priority:
Minor
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Resolution: Unresolved
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Affects Version/s: None
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Fix Version/s: None
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Labels:None
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Story Points:2
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Epic Link:
Description
It is very off-putting to visit a site that is written in a language you can't read.
To fix this problem, many Web sites show small flag icons for famous countries near the top of the page. When users click on a country flag, the site switches to a language of that country.
Let's provide an option on BioViz.org that will let users read the site in Spanish and French, in addition to English.
Questions:
- How can we encode the site in three languages simultaneously without creating a maintenance nightmare?
- How can we make it easy for translators to review translations & fix errors.
If this technical challenge can be solved, we can use a machine translator to create a first draft translation from English (original language). Next we can ask fluent speakers to review and/or correct the translation as needed.
Attachments
Activity
Google Chrome will interpret web pages and does a very good job.
One way the convention breaks down is that there is a many-to-one relationship between languages and countries. For example, in Canada people speak both English and French. Some people speak just one or the other well, but nearly everybody knows a little of each and many are fluent in both.
Another issue is that sometimes it's hard to recognize the flags when they consume little screen real estate. They are hard to see.
Instead of using flags to indicate an option to view the site in a different language, we could introduce a tiny icon that signals through its appearance that the icon will allow a translation to be shown. When a user hovers over the icon or clicks on it, the icon gets larger and presents many options for languages. The languages could be written the way speakers of languages typically write them.