Polyglot

Prep your product for internationalisation 🌍

1 follower

Prep your product for internationalisation 🌍

1 follower

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.

Launch tags:Tech

Launch Team

Whatson The Quiz Bot

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

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8yr ago

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 🙌

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8yr ago

Polyglot

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? 😊

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8yr ago

@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?

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8yr ago

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.

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8yr ago

@benoj British English > American English

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8yr ago

Omnify, Inc

This looks amazing. I have couple of questions? How accurate are these translations? And how many languages do you support at the moment?

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8yr ago

Polyglot

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.

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8yr ago

Interesting concept! Microsoft translate has its issues (so I had multiple bad translations when I tested it out), but I have been needing something to find quick translations at a glance for multiple languages at once. Definitely a product worth making! Flags will always cause problems. I use the Brazilian flag on my site when required and it actually refers to Brazilian Portuguese in particular, but I still get complaints from the Portuguese for not using their flag, since it's where the language came from. Generally though, a UK flag is more recognizable as representing English - to me an American flag is more about American English in particular. My question: What decides the order of languages, and which languages are included/excluded? I know Microsoft Translate would be capable of doing more than the number offered. Can that be customized? And a minor interface suggestion: At the moment the flags turn my mouse into a clickable hand when hovering-over, based on whatever Javascript or other code is running, and it's confusing since the click doesn't do anything.

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8yr ago

Polyglot

Maker

@irishpolyglot Thanks Benny! It's certainly not perfect though, based on my research anyway, it's one of the more accurate translators available with a decent api. Yeah that's an interesting point, definitely need to rethink the whole flag thing. The order is longest to shortest, the thinking being that the longest translation is the one you have to account for most. It can certainly do a lot more. I started with the worst offenders when it comes to translations—German, Russian, Spanish etc—though I've had requests to do more, or include settings so you can manually choose which to translate to.

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8yr ago

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.

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8yr ago

@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. ;)

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8yr ago

Polyglot

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.

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8yr ago

Knight TouchBar 2000

French flag is not correct! 😢

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8yr ago

Polyglot

Maker

@akdm_ Fantastic find thankyou! Just pushed up a fix 😊

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8yr ago

Knight TouchBar 2000

@mattanddesign Thanks to you 👍

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8yr ago

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. 😉

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8yr ago

Polyglot

Maker

@dkornyukhov Thanks!

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8yr ago

Polyglot

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

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8yr ago

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