Languages allowed in the new forums
August 25, 2007
I’m currently working on the new forum feature for BookMooch, and one of the features is enabling forums in other languages besides English.
Below is a list of the languages that are in the pick-list when you create a forum (anyone can create one). I didn’t want to use a list of all the languages in the world, as that’s too many, and sorting languages by “number of speakers” ends up with every dialect in India, but drops Finnish, Catalan, and other smaller languages that have a fairly big Internet presence.
I ended up using a list of “the most popular languages purchased when buying the language learning software by Transparent Language”. In other words, these are the languages most popular with people who own computers and want to learn another language. That seems to hit my target demographic pretty well.
Nonetheless, I checked LibraryThing’s language list, and I had missed some important languages such as Welsh, Turkish and Romanian, so I added the languages LibraryThing had, which I didn’t have. Note that my list is a lot longer than LibraryThing’s, but looking at some of the things I have, which they don’t, I think that’s probably just fine.
So, without further ado, here is my list of languages that forums can be in. If you see a language which you think should be on the list, please post a comment.
Arabic
Basque
Bengali
Bulgarian
Cambodian
Catalan
Chinese
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Estonian
Farsi
Finnish
French
German
Greek
Gujarati
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Icelandic
Indonesian
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Latin
Latvian
Lithuanian
Malayalam
Marathi
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Punjabi
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Sllovak
Spanish
Swedish
Tagalog
Tamil
Telugu
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Vietnamese
Welsh
You might want to consider adding a ‘translate this message’ button. I’ve seen other sites that do this by passing the URL to a web translation site. There are also bookmarklets that do this.
jpri
Wow! That’s a lot of languages.
I’d split (written) Chinese into Traditional and Simplified as they are quite different; both are used by millions of people.
And Latin? Might as well add Ancient Egyptian and Sanskrit to the list then IMO
.
For Chinese, just some of the characters are different between Traditional and Simplified, the language (putonghua) is the same, so if the program recognizes both sets of characters there’s no trouble.
Very happy to see Latin in there.
you might want to consider adding yiddish.
For an example of a great way to integrate the “translate this”-function, take a look at the Asoboo community http://www.asoboo.com
Marina: I disagree, thousands of characters are different or aren’t even used in Simplified. They’re usually treated as seperate languages on commercial websites (usually Traditional and Simplified versions) and by the media in general. That’s all I’m saying.
What I was saying, Stefan is that it may or may be not necessary depending if the program. Traditional and Simplified aren’t two different languages but two different ways of writing the same language. Chinese word processing programs, for instance recognize both sets.
That, though, could just be linguist me nitpicking…
Why not Esperanto? I don’t speak it, but it might attract the (weird) community of Esperanto speakers around the world…
Esperanto?
Esperanto is a language that was created with the intention of being universal. It’s meant to bring international peace and understanding. Because someone actually “made” the language it doesn’t have a lot of funny little blips that occur in a language that evolved naturally (English, I’m looking at you…). Relatively speaking, not a lot of people use it. The highest estimate is a few million.
Hi My name is Maria I like to speak my on language its italian any one have any book romance write in italian thankyou
Personally, I would appreciate Esperanto to be added. I now see that other users as well do so …