Polyglot

Prep your product for internationalisation 🌍

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A common problem when internationalising a product is not allowing enough space for the translated text. Polyglot will give you an indication of how much room to allow. Inspired by the excellent article Design for Internationalisation.
Polyglot gallery image
Polyglot gallery image
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What do you think? …

Anthony Da Mota
French flag is not correct! 😢
Matt Anderson
Maker
@akdm_ Fantastic find thankyou! Just pushed up a fix 😊
Anthony Da Mota
@mattanddesign Thanks to you 👍
Ben Flowers
I like the project - super useful for label translations etc.. what is the source for the translation? Side note - sorry to be that guy.... but English should be a Union Jack rather than an American flag? Or it should be split into en_GB and en_US e.g. colour vs color
Sam Goudie
Doopoll
@benoj @mattanddesign Flags look great, but they're unfortunately not a good indicator of language. Do you go for a Brazilian flag for Portuguese because it's population is higher? That being said, this project looks lovely and a helpful resource for designers dipping their toe into i18n. Great job 🙌
Matt Anderson
Maker
Thanks @benoj and @sgoudie! It uses the Microsoft Translator API—found it to be more reliable than Googles offering. Yeah i'm a little conflicted about that. Another example is Spanish which is spoken in many countries other than Spain. I tried a few other approaches, such as language codes, though I found flags to be a really good visual cue. I'm certainly open to suggestions if you had any? 😊
Eri O
@benoj @mattanddesign @sgoudie "they're unfortunately not a good indicator of language. Do you go for a Brazilian flag for Portuguese because it's population is higher?" Yes. That's exactly what we do for Portuguese: (https://goo.gl/HcWaWR). Just curious and seeking some insight: why would you say that flags are not a good indicator of language?
Sam Goudie
Doopoll
@benoj @mattanddesign @h3ricopt4 It's a trade off certainly. I think in the case of Polyglot, the flags add to the light and accessible feel of what you've built. We decided not to use flags for our interface because we have users around the world. The general UX principle I've always followed is flags communicate countries not languages. It's a matter of opinion certainly, and in the case of Polyglot I think you've made the right decision! Sometimes sticking to the 'correct' way can rob your product of personality.
Matthew Boogaard
@benoj British English > American English
Edward Vasquez
nice design, a question. Where do you get the translations?
Matt Anderson
Maker
@crowx Microsoft API. Controversial call it would seem though my research found it to be more accurate than other offerings from Google and the like.
Edward Vasquez
@mattanddesign If I also use a translation service that uses the microsoft and google api, and I realized that the microsoft is more lean
Trent Wood
I would call this barely an internationalization utility. In around 1998, Corel developed a tool called Catalyst for binary localization. That tool could detect truncated UI strings after translation and provide a report that you could use to fix them. Over the years, many companies, and even talented I18N engineers have developed good utilities to pseudo translate or detect truncations. I don't need a machine translation to tell me that a translation will be longer. A good rule of thumb is 30% expansion. A great utility would machine translate with NMT the entire app, detect truncations and layout problems and then provide a report. This would be better than old pseudo translation schemes and would provide a good I18N sanity check during early Dev.
Dmitry Kornyukhov
@trentwood Great idea, Trent! I think this tool was built mainly for those devs who know nothing about localization or internationalization. A starting point of sorts, to give them an "Aha" moment, so they could realize that not everything revolves around English :) @mattanddesign Matt, I think a cool idea for future development could be creating some sort of central hub with resources and articles on localization/internationalization best practices, as well as with links to useful tools or localization service providers. Call it a Localization Stash if you want. ;)
Matt Anderson
Maker
@trentwood 30% works ok for long form content, not so well for 1-2 word translations. As an example for 'Illustration' (https://hellopolyglot.com/?text=...) you'd only need to account for an 8% increase though 'Learn more' (https://hellopolyglot.com/?text=...) has a 120% increase. There's certainly more accurate tools—i'm currently on a team which has created tools to do much of what you describe—though that's not the point of this project. @dkornyukhov summed it up pretty well as more of a starting point.
Matt Anderson
Maker
Hey everyone! I'm Matt, the one behind Polyglot. Polyglot was built out of a frustration designing and building products for international audiences. My primary language is English, the company I work for is based in an english speaking location, so as a result the designs we create tend to be in English. That's all well and good until you realise that words can be many times longer when translated into other languages. Type a few words into polyglot and it will translate them into some of the notoriously-hard-to-translate languages and order them from longest to shortest. Hope you enjoy, and if you have any questions feel free to reach out 😊 https://hellopolyglot.com
kabandi saikia
This looks amazing. I have couple of questions? How accurate are these translations? And how many languages do you support at the moment?
Matt Anderson
Maker
@kabandisaikia As accurate as the Microsoft Translator API. It'd be hard to say an exact percentage, though it's accurate enough for the expected use case of this app. i.e. you wouldn't use it to actually translate a product, though as a guide for how much room to account for it's pretty good.
Dmitry Kornyukhov
Awesome product @mattanddesign! As someone who works in video game and app localization I always recommend my clients to leave up to 30% of extra room in their design if they ever plan on going global. This will save you, your translators and your customers a lot of grief. 😉
Matt Anderson
Maker
@dkornyukhov Thanks!
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