Language Lessons
Outline
- It's possible to live here in the United States and never be exposed to a
foreign language
- It's also possible to live here and rarely see English
- We live in a multi-cultural country
- As developers, we want to make our products as friendly and welcoming to
people as possible
- I work at Niche.com, a company who's mission is to help people "find where
[they] belong"
- But eating away at the back of my mind was the fact that our entire site is in
English
- So should we update our tagline? "Helping English-speakers find where they
belong?"
- Instead, how can we alter our product to help everyone, or at least as
many people as possible?
- For a three-day hackathon at Niche, I tried to find an answer to that question
- That pursuit opened the door to a whole new world of internationalization
- There are two areas on which I want to focus:
- Internationalization
- Localization
- The first option that I
- Translation services from companies like Google and Microsoft are valuable,
but they cannot grasp the nuances of the language
- For an example, on Niche.com we have a section on a school profile for
"Majors": academic areas of focus
- When you run that through an automated translator into Spanish, you get
Grandes Ligas or "Big Leagues"
- Google things you're trying to find the nickname for Major League Baseball
- There isn't an abstract syntax tree that you can parse nor a transpiler to
use: Translation (for now) requires humans
- So we set off translating!
- The goal was to take the headings of each section on a profile and translate
them into other languages
- Since we didn't have time to translate all of the content on the site,
helping people orient themselves on the page with a familiar language seemed
like a good place to start
- Using our team (with some help from parents), we were able to translate those
headings into <LOOK_UP_THE_NUMBER> different languages!
- Best practices
- Avoid flags to represent languages
- Your cultural identity is not defined by the origin country of the
language you speak
- I get a weird feeling when visiting a usually European site with a UK flag
in the top bar
- That feeling would be worse for someone in Hong Kong or Taiwan to see a
Chinese flag
- You might be an American citizen who prefers Spanish. You shouldn't have
to see the Mexican or Spanish flag everywhere.
- The best representation of a language is its name
Key terms
- internationalization
- localization
References
To reference