August 2007
Dealing with Babel
As far as I can tell, only 35% of the online world speaks English as their first language. That percentage may vary a bit if we consider only the fraction of the world with the luxury of choosing their meals, but the non-Anglophone fraction is still too large to ignore.
Software support for multiple languages, however, is still a tricky problem. Thanks in large part to Audrey’s participation in our development so far, we’ve made an effort from the very beginning to build a site which can be easily translated and presented in multiple languages. We use the Globalize plugin for Rails, which means that every text string which displays on the site is fed through a function which checks for translations into the users’ preferred language.
We’ve made sacrifices for this. The biggest and most obvious one is performance; so far, Globalize doesn’t batch its translations for a given page, so each string generates another database request; any page will spawn several dozen independent translation requests, which isn’t terribly efficient. This is one of the biggest drags on our site’s performance at this point (though we are hunting down others and streamlining where we see opportunities to do so.)
Another, lesser sacrifice has been in plain linguistic friendliness. In an effort to keep our language spare and easy to translate, we haven’t indulged in the sort of colloquialisms (”Take me to the kittens!“) that you’ll find on other sites. Twitter used LOLcats as error messages for a while; we can’t do that if we want to be multilingual. So if our language is sometimes a little stilted… well, consider how translatable it is.
Obviously, we haven’t made the commitment to translating this blog, either. Maybe someday that will come as well.
On Julia, Julie, and “foodies”
JohnL reminded me that yesterday was Julia Child’s birthday–her 95th, if she were still alive. The timing was apt, as Alison and I had been listening to the audiobook of Julie Powell’s Julie & Julia, the book which emerged from The Julie/Julia Project, on our way to and from our weekend events.
The audiobook is with Alison, so I haven’t finished it yet, but I have gone back and done some reading in the archives of The Julie/Julia Project, and I have now been struck twice–once in the book, and once again on the blog, where they come up earlier–by Powell’s thoughts about Child’s place in modern American cooking.
“…I have had enough. Enough of the $40 olive oils and imported semolina flour and ‘please, Turkish oregano only.’ If I read one more dining guru gushing about ‘honest ingredients, treated with respect,’ I shall vomit, sir. And ‘Market Menus’? Don’t get me started. The well-meant ‘food revolution’ Alice Waters instigated some thirty years ago has metastasized horribly. The Victorians served Strawberries Romanoff in December; now we demonstrate our superiority by serving our organic, dewy heirloom strawberries only during the two-week period when they can be picked ripe off the vine at the boutique farm down the road from our Hamptons bungalow. People speak of gleaning the green markets for the freshest this, the thinnest that, the greenest or firmest or softest whatever, as if what they’re doing is a selfless act of consummate care and good taste, rather than the privileged activity of someone who doesn’t have to work for a living.”
Powell goes on to say,
“Julia Child isn’t about that.
“Julia Child wants you–that’s right, you, the one living in the tract house in sprawling suburbia with a dead-end secretarial job and nothing but a Stop-n-Shop for miles around–to master the art of french cooking. (No caps, please.) She wants you to know how to make good pastry, and also how to make those canned green beans taste alright. She wants you to remember that you are human, and as such are entitled to that most basic of human rights, the right to eat well and enjoy life.”
(You can read all of Powell’s pseudo-manifesto here.)
Now, I just came out of two years of graduate student living, and the dietary difference between graduate students and undergrads is that graduate students recognize that pizza is not the only food group–not that they can do much about it. I don’t have deep-seated notions about food, and I don’t have a manifesto to deliver about how I feel about food. (Generally, I’m in favor.) I get intimidated when people start throwing around the phrase, “foodie.” But if I was looking for a flag to rally around, I would probably head for Powell’s (and Child’s) a lot faster than many of the others being waved nowadays.
Are special-interest social-networking sites the next big thing?
It should be obvious by now that we hope the answer to that question is “Yes,” but until we find out, we’re happy to see other people, like PC Magazine’s Tim Bajarin, asking it as well. In his column, “The Future of Social Networking,” Bajarin points out that the concept of getting specialized information from interest groups is nothing new–it’s been happening as long as the internet has been around–but it hasn’t been brought up to the technology standard set by the “social networking sites” of the past few years.
Bajarin uses Scuba Diving magazine–colleagues of mine when Scuba Diving was owned by Rodale–as an example of a “vertical” site which would benefit from social networking technology, but it’s also an example of how “old media” companies struggle to keep up with the pace of change on the internet. When I was at Rodale, working on runnersworld.com and its associated sites, the Scuba crew were always the ones pushing the envelope, doing new and exciting stuff in their Savannah office while those of us back at the mothership in Emmaus struggled with the IT department to implement message boards that weren’t painful to use.
Explaining why you’d prefer a “vertical” site to a general one is pretty easy. If I want information on how to bake good brownies, I don’t want to have to weed out all the hits from vintage photography sites. If I want to read about marathons, I don’t want to hear about Marathon Oil, or the other places where the long footrace is (ab)used as a metaphor. Sticking to a single interest makes your searches and discussions more powerful because they are automatically more specific.