Tag: localisation

Bunny's Language Linker: New WordPress Plugin [en]

[fr] Un nouveau plugin WordPress que je viens d'écrire. Celui-ci vous permet de gérer les liens entre pages équivalentes de deux versions linguistiques d'un site. Par exemple, si vous avez http://stephanie-booth.com/en et http://stephanie-booth.com/fr (deux installations WordPress séparées!), le plugin vous aidera à faire en sorte qu'il y ait des liens entre http://stephanie-booth.com/en/about et http://stephanie-booth.com/fr/a-propos.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m proud to announce the WordPress plugin Bunny’s Language Linker (zip, phps).

I’ve been wanting to write this plugin for ages, and I’ve finally done it this evening. This is a plugin for people who have a WordPress site with content duplicated in more than one language, like I’m going to have with stephanie-booth.com. For example, you have an “about” page in English, and another “about” page in German. This plugin helps you create and manage links between such “sister” pages. (“Pages”, not “posts”. It doesn’t work with posts at all.)

The plugin adds an extra field to the page editing form, inviting you to input the page slug of the sister page:

Bunny's Language Linker - Admin view

The screenshot is a bit small, but there on the right, there is a little box with “a-propos” — the slug of the French sister page. It works with more than one other language, too. You just need to edit the settings in the plugin file to specify which languages you’re playing with (instructions are in the plugin file). If I had sites in 3 other languages, say French, Spanish, and German, my settings line in the plugin file would look like this:

$bll_other_languages=array('fr', 'es', 'de');

And the little box would provide three different fields for the page slugs of the different localized sites. (OK, I’m making this sound complicated, sorry.)

The plugin then automatically adds links to the sister pages you’ve indicated. Here’s what it could look like:

Bunny's Language Linker - Page view

There’s a readme file with the plugin which will give you some more details. I’ll soon have a client site in production using that plugin, so if these explanations weren’t very clear, hopefully the demonstration will help.

What Do You Care About? [en]

[fr] Hier soir, au lieu de me demander "alors, qu'est-ce que tu fais?", David Isenberg m'a demandé "de quoi te préoccupes-tu" (ou, peut-être, "quels sont les thèmes chers à ton coeur" -- traduction pas évidente de "what do you care about").

En bref, je m'intéresse à l'espace où les gens et la technologie se rencontrent, particulièrement sur internet. Plus précisément:

  • les adolescents et internet
  • le multilinguisme sur internet

Yesterday evening in the skyscraper, I met David Isenberg, who instead of asking the very conventional “so, what do you do?” question, asked me “so, what do you care about?”

What a great question to ask somebody you’ve just met. It kind of blew my mind. Personally, I’ve come to dread the “what do you do?” question, because the answer is usually something like “uh, well, I’m a freelance consultant… blogging 101, stuff, teenagers, talks… bleh”. Which actually, does not adequately cover what I do and who I am. Actually, the evening before, somebody told me “you need to work on your sales pitch.” To which I answered that I didn’t have a sales pitch, because I don’t want to “sell myself” — if people want to work with me, they call me up or e-mail me, and I’m in the lucky situation that this provides enough interesting work to keep me busy and fed.

So, what do I care about? Mainly, about people, relationships, technology (particularly the internet) and where they intersect. That’s the whole “internet/web2.x consultant” thingy. And in a bit more detail, these days, there are two issues I care about a lot:

  • teenagers and their use of the internet, and the educational issues it raises (what the risks are and aren’t — insert rant about predator hysteria here — what is changing, what parents need to know)
  • languages online, particularly doing localisation right — insert rant about “country = language” here — and providing tools and strategies to help bridge people bridge language barriers better, and creating multilingual spaces (“multilingualism” stuff).

So, what do you care about?

Google Questions [en]

[fr] Comment Google détermine-t-il (1) le pays d'où provient un site et (2) la langue d'une page? Pourquoi les résultats d'une recherche en français sont-ils différents, selon qu'on utilise google.ch ou google.fr?

So, I’m writing up a document for a client about search engine placement. Not really an SEO thing, more a “good search engine placement results from popularity and success, not the opposite” thing. Like, (gosh, am I being eloquent right now,) setting objectives like “be in the first three results for this or that keyword combination is not very realistic.”

Anyway, I’m stuck in the part about limiting seach to one country or a language (which is a “big thing” if you live outside Anglophonia and ambition to reach the local population). I realise that the way Google manages these different searches is not quite clear to me.

Location

If you go to google.ch you can choose to do a search for “pages from Switzerland” (I’m using my name as a search term example). Or with google.fr, “pages from France” (language set to English both times so you can compare). My assumption (thanks shastry) is that they use server location for that. But is that all? (My server is in the US, so that explains why CTTS does not show up as a “Swiss” site.)

Language

If I select French as the search language, I get different results whether I use google.ch or google.fr. I assume Google uses language detection — but why are the results different?

Thanks for any explanation which can help me see a bit more clearly.

Multilingual Proposals (Reboot, BlogCamp) [en]

The famous conference reboot will take place in Copenhagen on 31.05-01.06. I’ll be attending.

I’m also going to make a proposal for a talk (as the (un)conference format encourages this). I’m being a bit shy about putting it up on the reboot site before I’m happy with the title and description, so for the moment it’s a Google Doc tentatively titled While We Wait For The Babel Fish.

Those of you who know me won’t be very surprised to learn that it’s about multilingualism online. By “multilingualism” online, I’m not only talking about localisation or stupid default languages, but mainly about what happens when one wants to get off the various monolingual islands out there and use more than one language in one place, for example. How can we help multiple languages coexist in a given space or community, as they do at times in the offline world? Can the tools we have help make this easier?

Another thing that interests me is this “all or nothing” assumption about knowing languages (when you have to check boxes): I wouldn’t check a box saying I “know” Italian, but I can understand some amount of it when it’s written, if it’s necessary. What are we capable of doing with that kind of information? Read the draft if you want more.

I’m also proposing a session at Saturday’s BlogCamp in Zürich which will be around similar issues, but which will focus precisely on the topic of multilingual blogging.

Feedback on these ideas (and anything here) is most welcome. Is this interesting?

Update 19.03.2007: proposal is now on the reboot site! Don’t hesitate to leave comments there.

Not All Switzerland Speaks German, Dammit! [en]

Here we go, yet another misguided attempt at localisation: my MySpace page is now in German.

MySpace now joins PayPal, eBay, Amazon, Google in defaulting to German for Swiss people.

Switzerland is a multilingual country. The linguistic majority speaks Swiss-German (reasonably close to German but quite un-understandable for native German-speakers who have not been exposed to it). Second language in the country is French. Third is Italian, and fourth is… (no, not English) …Romansh.

You know how linguistic minorities are. Touchy. Oh yeah.

As a French speaker with rather less-than-functional German, I do find it quite irritating that these big “multinational” web services assume that I speak German because I’m Swiss. I’d rather have English, and so would many of my non-bilingual fellow-cititzens (particularly amongst web-going people, we tend to be better at English than German).

Yes, I’ve said that English-only is a barrier to adoption. But getting the language wrong is just as bad, if not worse (most people have come to accept the fact that English is the “default” language on the internet, even if they don’t understand it). If I want my Amazon books to be shipped here free of charge, I have to use Amazon.de, which is in German, and doesn’t have a very wide choice of French books. My wishlist is therefore on Amazon.de too, which maybe explains why I never get anything from it.

Paypal is almost worse. I can’t really suggest it to clients as a solution for “selling stuff over the internet”, because all it offers in its Swiss version is a choice between German (default) and English. You can’t sell a book in French with a payment interface in German or English.

So please, remember that country != language, and that there is a little place called Switzerland scrunched up in the middle of Europe, caught between France, Italy, Germany and Austria (Liechtenstein is even worse off than us I suppose), and that not everyone in that little country speaks German.

Thank you.

MediaWiki [en]

I’ve installed MediaWiki. Explanation and solution of a bug I bumped into while installing (because of UTF-8 in MySQL 4.1.x) and comments on the method for interface translation.

[fr] J'ai installé MediaWiki pour récussiter le moribond SpiroLattic, tombé sous les coups du wiki-spam. Voici la solution à  un problème que j'ai rencontré durant l'installation (dû au fait que j'utilise MySQL 4.1.x avec UTF-8), et aussi une description de la façon dont est faite la localisation par utilisateur de l'interface. Très intéressant!

I recently managed to install MediaWiki to replace PhpWiki for SpiroLattic, which I took offline some time ago because the only activity it had become home to was the promotion of various ringtone, viagra, and poker sites.

MediaWiki is the wiki engine behind Wikipedia. It is PHP/MySQL (good for me, maybe not for the server) and has a strong multilingual community.

I bumped into one small problem installing MediaWiki 1.4: the install aborted while creating the tables. Unfortunately, I don’t have the error message anymore, but it was very close to the one given for this bug.

If I understood correctly, when you’re running MySQL 4.1.x in UTF-8, the index key becomes too big, and MySQL balks. The solution is to edit maintenance/tables.sql and to change the length of the index key MySQL was complaining about. In my case, the guilty part of the query was KEY cl_sortkey(cl_to,cl_sortkey(128)) — I replaced 128 by 50 and it went fine. (Don’t forget to clean out the partially built database before reloading the install page — like that you don’t have to fill it all in again.)

MediaWiki allows each user to choose his or her language of choice for the interface. That is absolutely great, particularly for a multilingual wiki! Even better than that, they let users tweak the interface translation strings directly on the wiki.

There is a page named “Special:Allmessages” which lists all the localized strings. If you’re not happy with one of the translations, just click on the string, and the wiki will create a new blank page where you can enter your translation for it, which will override the initial translation. How cool is that?

Something like that for WordPress would be great, in my opinion!