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azurelunatic) wrote in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_suggestions2011-08-09 02:15 am
Better multilingual entry support
Title:
Better multilingual entry support
Area:
entries, search
Summary:
Allow entries to be tagged with the language(s) that they are composed of. This can be used to power more interesting things around the site.
Description:
Entries composed of written or spoken material (text, images of writing, audio, video) usually have one or more languages in which the material is presented. Allowing entries to be voluntarily tagged by their owners to describe the language(s) they are using might allow some interesting features to be developed based on entry tagging.
If a particular spelling appears in more than one language, specifying the language of the entry in site search could help find the thing someone's looking for.
Statistics on actual use of the site by users who speak different languages might be helpful to staff, especially if the technical barriers to offering the site in translation are overcome.
It could help users better connect with people who speak their same language, especially users whose preferred language is in a minority on the site.
What would the user interface be like? A whole long list of possible languages could a) be unwieldy, b) might also leave out languages used by actual site users (sign languages and constructed languages spring to mind as languages that might be left out of even a fairly exhaustive list of languages, and entries with embedded video might have sign language, and fannish communities are reasonably likely to include Tengwar and Klingon, and goodness knows there are probably more use cases that I know nothing of).
One way to do it might be like the tags interface, where something can be typed in, and attempt to autofill from a preset list, but accept new entries gracefully. If designed properly, unique data entered here on public entries could be logged, collated, and presented to an administrator on a regular basis for review; items that are found to be actual common languages not present on the list could then be entered.
Any site function that involves searching by language should allow for synonyms -- three different people might use "tlhIngan Hol", "pIqaD", and "Klingon" to mean the same language -- to say nothing of the typos. There should be a way to bundle known synonyms and known typos -- and also a way to override this bundling.
Another challenge is that people might not tag all their entries (to say nothing of back entries). How hard/expensive would it be to autodetect languages? Failing autodetection, could a default be set by user, like the last language they used?
This suggestion:
Should be implemented as-is.
38 (57.6%)
Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
4 (6.1%)
Shouldn't be implemented.
2 (3.0%)
(I have no opinion)
20 (30.3%)
(Other: please comment)
2 (3.0%)
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(Tangent: I would still want /latest/ to display all entries in all languages; if I wanted to see only entries in French, I could bookmark something like /latest/?lang=fr to see all the French entries. Or maybe even ?lang=fr,ko,en for multiple languages? But I like seeing the linguistic variety on /latest/; it's a good demonstration that DW isn't just for one particular niche.)
Back to the original suggestion:
- Language tags should constitute a separate entry area from regular tags.
- An entry can contain multiple languages, so tagging an entry with multiple languages should be part of this feature.
- I'd like to be able to set a default language tag going forward; I will write predominantly in English, and I wouldn't want to have to remember to add the language tag every time. I'm already bad enough at consistently using regular tags >_>
- Going backwards, it would be awesome to retroactively apply a language tag as part of the mass-entry-editor, even if this had to be a paid-only or time-delayed feature.
- Synonym-bundling of language tags, yes, absolutely, especially across languages.
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It's also an elegent solution to an issue now we're getting a fair few non-English posts. I'd also like to see a way of filtering them off my network page if possible, but that'd probably need a separate suggestion after there's a way to tag entries.
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I'm a bit disillusioned today, I guess :/
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