LANGUAGES

[+krtecci]

Dear Groundspeak,

 

you are a company running successfully geocaching.com for year. Have you ever wondered why such places as geocaching.pl or geocaching.ru exist? And why there are SO little caches placed in Poland or Russia registered here? The same thing goes for many other countries.

 

I think it would be in your own interest to translate this website into other languages (what do you do with the membership fees???), now this geocaching world is terribly separated simply because not everybody does speak English (although you certainly feel that everybody should learn or simply know). Of course, geocaching comes from USA but it's been years now since it came to exist. I thought you wanted to create a world geocaching website, not just a US one (and all English speaking countries now, which are unfortunatelly too numerous).

 

Thank you in advance for any official reply,

 

Mirek Voracek

Czech republic

[+weinema]

Yes, I also see this problem for Germany (opencaching.de, navicache.de).

Some friends of mine will not use geocaching.com 'cause it's only in english ':-(

 

So we have now two separate databases here in Germany

and it happens very often that a opencaching.de cache is at the same

position as a geocaching.com cache :-/

 

OK, a multilanguage geocaching.com website will not solve the "problem" 100%

but the future will show that additional websites maybe will not be used more

and more...

 

A 1st step could be to add google translation icons.

 

Martin

aka WEINEMA

[+yawetag]

I don't see why Groundspeak wouldn't make a "translation" file that has every possible word or phrase that can be translated. This file is numbered by rows so that it can be used seamlessly with the site (and some coding changes, obviously). I've seen "lesser" sites and programs have this functionality, so it can't be too difficult.

 

I think this is a great idea.

[+krtecci]

We can say that it`s their own problem if people cant understand English, they are missing the world`s largest geocaching community, but we also miss their place. Have you ever wondered why there are 52 caches in Russia, the biggest country? No way, there are over 3000 caches, but listed only on Russian pages, we can say because they are an overpatriotic nation, of course, but the main reason is that when you open geocaching.com and you don`t speak English you are totally lost.

So Google icons would be totally lost in the "English mess", although it would be a valuable "first step". However, the entire webpage must be multilingual. The listings themselves are not a problem, everybody can always babelfish or ask the author.

I am willing to cooperate with Groundspeak in the process (if you need interpreters for example), we have opencaching.cz as well, although luckily, the majority of Czech cachers do use this official webpage.

I also hope more people show their support, although I am afraid that most non-English speaking cachers do not visit this forum.

[+trainlove]

I don't see the problem here. I've seen many cache pages writen in languages that I can't understand. I've written a log in a language that I don't know by using a translator found by google to let a friend know of a special delivery geocoin I left in her cache. She said that the translation was kind of wierd but she understood what I was saying.

[+yawetag]

The problem is in navigating to those pages. None of geocaching.com's pages are translated into other languages. For example, a cache page's write-up may be in Spanish, but none of the other information is.

 

I don't see the problem here. I've seen many cache pages writen in languages that I can't understand. I've written a log in a language that I don't know by using a translator found by google to let a friend know of a special delivery geocoin I left in her cache. She said that the translation was kind of wierd but she understood what I was saying.

[+klossner]

I've seen "lesser" sites and programs have this functionality, so it can't be too difficult.

I have worked on products that support multiple languages, and I'm here to tell you that it's a huge amount of work.

 

One product had an error in the translation of a message to Japanese, resulting in an unintentionally offensive phrase. We got the word that a Japanese salesperson had "lost honor" as a result. I got to spend two weeks eyeballing tens of thousands of hexadecimal numbers looking for differences between the files we got from the translators and the resulting computer source code.

 

You cannot go into an "i18n" (internationalization) effort half-heartedly. You must commit significant resources to get acceptable results.

[+trainlove]

The problem is in navigating to those pages. None of geocaching.com's pages are translated into other languages. For example, a cache page's write-up may be in Spanish, but none of the other information is.

 

Quite right.

But I imagine that if you are in a foreign country you should expect all caches to be written in the language of that country. Now if one just wanted to see a cache page written in German or Japanese I guess there is no way to search for that. And, well, I know of few web sites that hhave the ability to have the whole web site in any selected language.

 

P.S. When is English NOT going to be the official language of the USA. THe invaders are at the gate.

Who invented the sport of geocaching? Who invented the GPS system? What magor companies make GPS's? All American as far as the eye can see...

[+StarBrand]

While it might be easy enough to support some of the "larger" more widespread languages, I think it would be difficult to support more than a small handful. I understand the issue well enough but it is hugely complex and expensive to correctly translate to various languages.

[+yawetag]

Yes, there are sites (babelfish, for example) that will translate a website from one language to another. However, the site is HORRIBLE with translation. You have to decipher what it spits out. Unfortunately, we don't all have one in our head that does it correctly.

 

There is one problem with the GC site, though. All of the links on the left side ("Getting Started," "Hide & Seek a Cache," etc.) are images, not text. Those will not be translated.

 

I speak English and only English, but I think the site really needs to look at international users that don't. If it can't be used on the site (using either IP addresses, country codes, or user settings) directly, then Groundspeak should look at making multiple GC sites (geocaching.es, geocaching.ru, etc.) to cater to those people.

 

The problem is attracting new users that know NOTHING about geocaching. They come to the site and can't read ANYTHING because nothing is translated. Yes (and I mentioned this before), their cache write-ups will be in their language, but if they don't know what they're doing, how can they use that information?

 

I think that if Groundspeak wants to take the venture, then they should start with the "popular" languages (English, Spanish, French) and then work from there. I don't expect them to add Zulu or Cherokee.

 

Quite right.

But I imagine that if you are in a foreign country you should expect all caches to be written in the language of that country. Now if one just wanted to see a cache page written in German or Japanese I guess there is no way to search for that. And, well, I know of few web sites that hhave the ability to have the whole web site in any selected language.

 

P.S. When is English NOT going to be the official language of the USA. THe invaders are at the gate.

Who invented the sport of geocaching? Who invented the GPS system? What magor companies make GPS's? All American as far as the eye can see...

[+scottpa100]

It will be a business decision on how Groundspeak want the business to grow. Translating is hugely expensive and time consuming. I work for a local authority in the UK (equivalent in the US, County? I think...) and where I am in north Wales, anything that gets published for the public, has to, by law, be published in both Welsh and English. Which is fine, I don't have a problem with that, but it does take time. And does slow down publication of information.

 

But if Groundspeak want the business to grow, and the internet being global and everything, this is something they may want to consider. Certainly within Europe, the fact the countries that have a language which is Germanic in origin (where English also stems from) they are the biggest users of the geocaching.com website OR the countries which have always had (Portugal springs to mind) a large amount of people learning English OR the the countries which have a lot new English learners since the fall of the wall (Czech Republic, Poland etc). France - 5th largest economy in the world, technical literate community - number of caches, don't know but I was able to fit the entire country on a query last summer. Yet here in the UK, I can fit a radius of about 40 miles from my home co-ords before my query tops out.

[+sTeamTraen]

Jeremy has stated in these forums that internationalisation will be an important aspect of V2 of the site. I presume we can expect announcements in due course about how it will be done.

 

Have you ever wondered why there are 52 caches in Russia, the biggest country? No way, there are over 3000 caches, but listed only on Russian pages, we can say because they are an overpatriotic nation, of course, but the main reason is that when you open geocaching.com and you don`t speak English you are totally lost.

 

There's a rumour (which goes around on the forums any time anyone says "I'm off to Russia for a trip, where should I go caching?") that GPSr ownership is illegal in Russia. But I've never seen it confirmed by anyone who lived there...

 

P.S. When is English NOT going to be the official language of the USA.

 

That would be today. The USA has no official language. Really. Check it out.

 

France - 5th largest economy in the world, technical literate community - number of caches, don't know but I was able to fit the entire country on a query last summer.

 

Not quite. France fits just into the PQ radius but you'll need 8 PQs to get our 3750+ caches. Still small, but growing faster than any state or country of comparable size, population, or number of caches. However, the language issue is a big one. The excellent (but totally unofficial) local site www.geocaching-france.com is responsible for a large part of the recent growth (we've tripled the number of caches in the last 14 months).

[+krtecci]

I perfectly agree with yawetag, you've got a good point of view. I think the important thing to understand is the marketing. Translating is a technical issue which I am not too familiar with (but it's obvious we don't want Zulu and Cherokee, better French and German), but I am very happy we have people telling us about the technical matters on this forum topic.

The MARKETING issue is the clue. I assume there's a tough everlasting question about having the site accessible to everyone or only to subscribers that have registered and paid. I think that with the present state of Groundspeak marketing, the absolute number of caches and users will grow, but the increase will be inferior to the growth of other services in specific countries and it will become more and more complicated to join all the different services together.

[Jeremy]

V2 of the Geocaching.com web site will be localized in both German and Japanese but since it will be designed for multiple languages we will have resource files available to translate into other languages. Japanese and German seemed like the best first languages since Japanese doesn't use latin-based characters and German words can be extremely long. If we can do those two we can cover almost every other language.

 

The only languages we won't be supporting perfectly are ones that read from right to left. Flip flopping web pages isn't something we wanted to do.

[+yawetag]

And we've heard it from the man himself.

 

Thanks, Jeremy!

 

V2 of the Geocaching.com web site will be localized in both German and Japanese but since it will be designed for multiple languages we will have resource files available to translate into other languages. Japanese and German seemed like the best first languages since Japanese doesn't use latin-based characters and German words can be extremely long. If we can do those two we can cover almost every other language.

 

The only languages we won't be supporting perfectly are ones that read from right to left. Flip flopping web pages isn't something we wanted to do.

[+2]

Does the translation include all web content of the current version (i.e. guidelines)?

 

Who's doing the translation; natives or stupid programs?

 

Is there any timeline of when the V2 release will be going online?

 

Edit: typo

Edited November 21, 2007 by 2

[+krtecci]

Wonderful, that sounds like a great start, thanks for the message Jeremy! I hope it goes smoothly with both Japanase and German :-)