Inside LabourStart

When LabourStart began having correspondents, they all knew English.  In fact, at the beginning the only way to become a correspondent was by emailing me, and those emails were all in English.  But now as we approach having 1,000 correspondents, we are beginning to run into some whose English is not very good, or non-existent. And we welcome those comrades to join us — which means that putting news onto LabourStart has to work in languages other than English.

We sorted this out a couple of years ago with French (thanks to Andy) and now we’ve had a request from Masha to do the same for Russian, which we’ve set up today and are now testing.

Basically, doing this involves two things —

1. Tagging correspondents with a specific language (e.g., French)
2. When such a correspondent logs in to add news, they see texts drawn from a file called lsxx.txt where the “xx” is the two letter code for their language (e.g., fr is French).  Nearly all the correspondents today are using the lsen.txt, which is in English — and this is the file that needs to be translated into additional languages for this to work.

We should be planning to do this for all the languages LabourStart appears in, which will allow us to recruit correspondents to work in a much wider range of languages.