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.
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