Waiting for the Babel Fish: Languages and Multilingualism

Slide 1: Stephanie Booth Waiting for the Babel Fish

Slide 2: Internet: Space Cruncher Freedom from spatial constraints more intercultural contact change of initial obstacle: space language

Slide 3: Linguistic Borders Online, the strongest borders are linguistic. Some multilingual people act as bridges. How could our tools assist them in their task?

Slide 4: Misconceptions But everybody speaks English! country = language

Slide 5: Geographical Abuse IP => country => language, right? country != language bad localisation

Slide 6: Countries are important, but... for language: one factor amongst several ● ● for laws: very important taxes & censorship Examples: - shipping ● - porn ●

Slide 7: Guilty: Amazon

Slide 8: Guilty: eBay

Slide 9: Guilty: PayPal

Slide 10: Guilty: Google Google.ch => DE Blogger in France => FR

Slide 11: L10n advice for Tool Builders localise early, localise smart plan non-EN from the start (not an afterthought) – language != country – regional variations (fr-fr, fr-ch, fr-qc, fr-be...) – involve the community – in-house « linguist » – smart user language detection –

Slide 12: Detecting User Language Specified by: ● profile (tool-side) ● browser preferences ● OS/browser language ● geographical location ● one language? n languages? priority? how proficient?

Slide 13: Using Browser Language Prefs We need more of this.

Slide 14: What are my languages? Know? Speak? Read? Write? Read a book? A newspaper article? Have a conversation? Write a letter? Write a book? Give a talk? know / don't know (too binary)

Slide 15: Multilingual Humans Who is multilingual? Being human among humans means living in a state of ever incomplete multilingualism. Mario Wandruszka more multilinguals than monolinguals

Slide 16: Monolingual Silos ● isn't the internet multilingual? multilingual community <> multilingual people multiple monolingual spaces <> mixing languages where do we fit in?

Slide 17: Blogging Tools: WordPress well localised a solution: other- ● language excerpts language is a blog- ● translation is too hard level attribute ● keeps mono&multi ● assumes you blog in ● audience quite happy one language keeps the bridge-blogger ● no in-built strategies very happy ● for mixing languages => 1 blog per language

Slide 18: Presence Tools: Twitter not localised ● => adoption issue non-EN ● communities present language ● filtering? language ● detection?

Slide 19: L10n Insufficient Localisation: translation of the interface into another ● language monolingual in various languages ● « Multilingualisation »: (yes, it's ugly) mixing languages ● manages code-switching ● different language combinations ●

Slide 20: We're Already Doing It! Even if our tools aren't made for it we're already acting out our multilingualism online one web page != one language one person/user != one language

Slide 21: Same Page Translation

Slide 22: A Review in Two Languages

Slide 23: Twittering

Slide 24: Twittering

Slide 25: Quoting Foreign Language Sources

Slide 26: Blogging Bilingually

Slide 27: ...Or Worse

Slide 28: Multilingual Social Network

Slide 29: MMORPG Chat

Slide 30: Commenting on a Blog Post

Slide 31: Commenting on a Blog Post

Slide 32: Commenting on a Flickr Photo

Slide 33: Lost in Translation

Slide 34: The Multilingual Challenge Making a space both: multilingual-friendly ● monolingual-friendly ● How do we keep everybody happy? different language combinations ● different language skills ● No solution is perfect for everybody.

Slide 35: Going Multilingual a strategic and technical problem Strategic Technical how do we allow languages design (space use, ● ● to mix? functionality, usability!) what do we translate? encoding ● ● what do we show people? lang, hreflang (HTML) ● ● how do people define their language detection ● ● language skills? automated translation ● how do people define what ● they want to see? Remember. Most people are multilingual.

Slide 36: Bonne route ! Flickr Photo Credits romerican ● Antoon Kuper ● Hobvias Sudoneighm ● Grant MacDonald ● Zoom Zoom ● A JC ● Claude Covo-Farchi ● Stephanie Booth Lausanne, Switzerland http://climbtothestars.org stephanie.booth@gmail.com Web2Open, 06.11.2007 Berlin, DE Skype: steph-booth