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.