Support communities with multi-language support - a quick approach.
With Steemit being a global initiative, it is weird and somewhat disturbing that is lacks any multi-language support. Let's keep in mind that we still haven't reached the main population of people, most of whom are not as computer-literate as our current users. This was as I understood (partly?) one of the reasons for the splitting off of the Russian speaking community and the Rise of Golos.
I hope the programmers are working on this, also to avoid other Golos'es appearing.
Multi-language support has a few sides to it.
Firstly, the website should be able to determine the language you're using (by browser detection, NOT GEO detection) and show the site in the appropriate language, if available. Otherwise default to English.
There must be a clear and easy way to change languages in case the user prefers the site in a different language.
The other part applies to writing an Story (or post, most cannot be classified as stories by any stretch of the imagination).
When you publish a story, the system should either default the language to English, or a language you define in your settings. But there must always be the option to override this setting, per story, even after publishing.
You should also have the possibility to tell Steemit which languages you want to view.
I, as well as everyone else, see a huge list of posts, with quite a lot of languages I do not know. I do not read Chinese, Korean, Russian or the like, nor do I have the intention to learn them all.
However for other people that content can be more valuable than the English content and they not be interested at all in English or German content.
There are some developments where people use tags to form localized communities, Korean and Chinese being prime examples.
Although this makes sense, we also introduced our first problems, caused by a lack of understanding how to properly make a site multi-lingual. For instance CN is being used for Chinese. However CN is a country code and stands for China, the proper language code for Chinese is zh (lowercase). Now if someone from Hong Kong uses HK for its post, people from China will never see this post if they select the CN tag.
So I would propose to anyone to use one of the five tag fields to determine in which language the post is written.
For this use the Language code, NOT the Country code.
Here is a list with the correct codes.
ISO-639 Language Codes
| Language | Code |
|---|---|
| Abkhazian | ab |
| Afar | aa |
| Afrikaans | af |
| Albanian | sq |
| Amharic | am |
| Arabic | ar |
| Armenian | hy |
| Assamese | as |
| Aymara | ay |
| Azerbaijani | az |
| Bashkir | ba |
| Basque | eu |
| Bengali (Bangla) | bn |
| Bhutani | dz |
| Bihari | bh |
| Bislama | bi |
| Breton | br |
| Bulgarian | bg |
| Burmese | my |
| Byelorussian (Belarusian) | be |
| Cambodian | km |
| Catalan | ca |
| Chinese (Simplified) | zh |
| Chinese (Traditional) | zh |
| Corsican | co |
| Croatian | hr |
| Czech | cs |
| Danish | da |
| Dutch | nl |
| English | en |
| Esperanto | eo |
| Estonian | et |
| Faeroese | fo |
| Farsi | fa |
| Fiji | fj |
| Finnish | fi |
| French | fr |
| Frisian | fy |
| Galician | gl |
| Gaelic (Scottish) | gd |
| Gaelic (Manx) | gv |
| Georgian | ka |
| German | de |
| Greek | el |
| Greenlandic | kl |
| Guarani | gn |
| Gujarati | gu |
| Hausa | ha |
| Hebrew | he |
| Hindi | hi |
| Hungarian | hu |
| Icelandic | is |
| Indonesian | id |
| Interlingua | ia |
| Interlingue | ie |
| Inuktitut | iu |
| Inupiak | ik |
| Irish | ga |
| Italian | it |
| Japanese | ja |
| Javanese | ja |
| Kannada | kn |
| Kashmiri | ks |
| Kazakh | kk |
| Kinyarwanda (Ruanda) | rw |
| Kirghiz | ky |
| Kirundi (Rundi) | rn |
| Korean | ko |
| Kurdish | ku |
| Laothian | lo |
| Latin | la |
| Latvian (Lettish) | lv |
| Limburgish (Limburger) | li |
| Lingala | ln |
| Lithuanian | lt |
| Macedonian | mk |
| Malagasy | mg |
| Malay | ms |
| Malayalam | ml |
| Maltese | mt |
| Maori | mi |
| Marathi | mr |
| Moldavian | mo |
| Mongolian | mn |
| Nauru | na |
| Nepali | ne |
| Norwegian | no |
| Occitan | oc |
| Oriya | or |
| Oromo (Afan, Galla) | om |
| Pashto (Pushto) | ps |
| Polish | pl |
| Portuguese | pt |
| Punjabi | pa |
| Quechua | qu |
| Rhaeto-Romance | rm |
| Romanian | ro |
| Russian | ru |
| Samoan | sm |
| Sangro | sg |
| Sanskrit | sa |
| Serbian | sr |
| Serbo-Croatian | sh |
| Sesotho | st |
| Setswana | tn |
| Shona | sn |
| Sindhi | sd |
| Sinhalese | si |
| Siswati | ss |
| Slovak | sk |
| Slovenian | sl |
| Somali | so |
| Spanish | es |
| Sundanese | su |
| Swahili (Kiswahili) | sw |
| Swedish | sv |
| Tagalog | tl |
| Tajik | tg |
| Tamil | ta |
| Tatar | tt |
| Telugu | te |
| Thai | th |
| Tibetan | bo |
| Tigrinya | ti |
| Tonga | to |
| Tsonga | ts |
| Turkish | tr |
| Turkmen | tk |
| Twi | tw |
| Uighur | ug |
| Ukrainian | uk |
| Urdu | ur |
| Uzbek | uz |
| Vietnamese | vi |
| Volapük | vo |
| Welsh | cy |
| Wolof | wo |
| Xhosa | xh |
| Yiddish | yi |
| Yoruba | yo |
| Zulu | zu |
For the @steemit programmers, if you could add a pull-down menu based on these codes, that would already be a quick-and-dirty solution for the time being.
Using this approach we can try and prevent future problems and also make the overall experience for everyone a lot better.
Nice point of view ... People should stop using their country as a tag for every post they make...
@blevley got you a $2.13 @minnowbooster upgoat, nice! (Image: pixabay.com)
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