While We Wait For The Babel Fish

Slide 1: Stephanie Booth While We Wait for the Babel Fish

Slide 2: Human? Internet Languages in the human world ● on the internet ● Is it a fit?

Slide 3: 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 4: 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 5: Internet: Space Cruncher Freedom from spatial constraints more intercultural contact change of initial obstacle: space language

Slide 6: Linguistic Borders Online, the strongest borders are linguistic. Some multilingual people act as bridges. How could our tools assist them in their task?

Slide 7: Monolingual Silos But the internet is multilingual! multilingual community <> multilingual people multiple monolingual spaces mixing languages

Slide 8: 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...) – crowdsource – in-house « linguist » – smart user language detection –

Slide 9: Detecting User Language Specified by: profile (tool-side) ● browser preferences ● OS/browser language ● geographical location ● one language? n languages? priority? how proficient?

Slide 10: Misconceptions But everybody speaks English! country = language

Slide 11: Geographical Abuse IP => country => language, right? Guilty: PayPal, Amazon, eBay, Google country != language bad localisation

Slide 12: Countries can be important for language: one factor amongst several for laws: very important taxes & censorship Examples: - shipping ● - porn ●

Slide 13: 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 14: 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 15: Presence Tools: Twitter not localised ● => adoption issue non-EN ● communities present language ● filtering? language ● detection?

Slide 16: 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 17: Going Multilingual a strategic and technical problem Strategic Technical how do we allow languages design ● ● to mix? encoding ● what do we translate? ● lang, hreflang (HTML) ● what do we show people? ● language detection ● how do people define their ● automated translation ● language skills? Remember. Most people are multilingual.

Slide 18: Bonne route ! Flickr Photo Credits romerican ● Paco CT ● Antoon Kuper ● Hobvias Sudoneighm ● Grant MacDonald ● Zoom Zoom ● A JC ● Stephanie Booth Claude Covo-Farchi ● Lausanne, Switzerland http://climbtothestars.org stephanie.booth@gmail.com reboot9, 31.05-01.06.2007 Copenhagen Skype: steph-booth