Internationalization
LabourStart has lead the way in the international trade union movement with its 22 languages but we need to do more. We know that many of our pages retain elements of English and are not as user-friendly as they might be to non-English speakers.
Andy Funnell in France has made a number of helpful suggestions which I have begun implementing. I welcome other suggestions as well as offers to help.
Here’s what we’ve done today:
- The searchbox and mailing list signup now end with the more universal ‘OK’ rather than the English ‘Go’.
- In the French version – and soon others – the ‘search union websites with Solicomm’ phrase has been translated.
- In the French version – and others if they want – ‘ActNOW’ on the front page has been translated into French. I realize that in some languages, they would prefer to stick with ‘ActNOW’.
- I’ve now separated out top stories from others – in the French version with two separate titles and in all others, for the moment, with a horizontal bar. Your suggestions for how to title the two sections would be appreciated.
- I’ve improved the French translation of the signup to our mailing list phrase – the ones we were using were taken from the IUF site, but apparently the translations are not what our correspondents want to see.
- I’ve fixed a bug which meant that if you clicked on, for example, ‘Suisse’ next to a story on the French page it would show you English language stories from Switzerland. Now it shows the French ones. This is fixed for all languages.
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“Search union websites with Solicomm” in Norwegian:
“Søk på faglige nettsteder med Solicomm”
The Norwegian special characters do not work well with Solicomm. Try to search with “Løken” for example, and see how it looks. It says it returns searches for “løken”, and in fact finds everything with “lø” and “ken” (as separate words)
I’ve fixed the text in Norwegian.
As for the problems with Solicomm, I’m passing your comment on to them.
thanks
Unfortunately the SoliComm search engine is now working just in English. The fact that it may show some pages in other languages is due to the “mixed” nature of Internet (sites that declare to contain English but do have pages in other languages).
We’re working on adding more languages, but the first ones will be French, Spanish and Portuguese, which are the languages that ACTRAV (http://actrav.itcilo.org) uses more during its teaching activities.
We would like very much to be able to do more, and we hope someday we will.
“Top stories” are still posing a problem in languages other than English. Most “other language pages” aren’t running them. The French page does. But perhaps, not for the right reasons. “Top stories” seem to be a way of getting stories from our own country on top. But the idea is surely to get the most important stories for the whole francophone community to the top.
I bet that the “English translation” is at fault. Priority 3 “High – country” really means “High for the language”. To say it another way, in French, “High” is for the francophone community including Quebec, France, Maghreb, several African countries, French Polynesia, Mauritius, Madagascar, Louisiana (lol), etc. and not just a union from one of these countries seeking to distinguish itself.
Let’s hope the implementation of the translated correspondents interface will help rectify this (lmfr.txt).
Also, what happens to a “Top 5 story” when it drops from the top and how are they treated in the RSS and JS feeds?