It recently dawned on me that I speak the Spanish language. Not in a "I got my PhD in Spanish" from some far off university way, but in a my parents speak Spanish and so do I way. Just recently I wrote about the importance of sharing your code and with that new ways to help me achieve that have come to light. And so to go along with that new found (or newly realized) knowledge, I have decided to begin the long and arduous journey of site localization on this blog and to begin writing posts in both English and Spanish and whatever language I can keep up in my time. This post will not be a how to on site localization however, as that would take me a good while and a fair number of examples and pros and cons and hair pulling and such. But in a future post I will cover what I did in order to localize this website and I will give a fairly general template that you can use as well if you wish to do the same.
more than just language
Localization is much more than just textual translations on a website. That's the first step in the process. But equally as important is transcribing anything that might be perceived differently to another culture, such as date formats, measurement units and currencies and such. Lucky for me, I do not have to worry about these on this blog. But it's important to remember that site translation does not equate to site localization.
translation is just a part of localization
This world is a pretty big place. And most people, I'd wager, can speak multiple languages. Except that they use one as their primary for their day to day survival and such. Based on numerous online resources, and it's the best we can do for now as far as estimates go, there are approximately 570 million Spanish speakers worldwide. And it would be a waste to not attempt communication with any of those people through this online forum that I call a blog.
During the next few months and years I'll be writing content in both English and Spanish, and in any other language that I pick up along the way. And while I could just as easily have used a translation plugin, like Google Translate, I feel like something get's lost in that process. Things such as humor and sarcasm don't normally translate easily as comedian bots are still decades away. And a big part of a language is a familiarity with the culture itself. By directly translating content I have full control of how I want my words to be interpreted for the most part. And while my written Espanol is not the best, my spoken Espanol is decent enough to try and have this blog reach a farther off place and a wider audience.
Along with the translation, the site will get some custom localization features which I am very excited to both create and to write about in the near future as well. There's slightly more work than just translations when it comes to browsers and the web unfortunately. Language detection is a major part of the entire flow. Also page element translations are important as well in order to keep a consistent language throughout the entire site. And by that I mean there needs to be a mechanism in place to store and map generic content to the many different page elements on a website.
localization is not easy
It sounds simple, but once you start that journey you will trip over rocks the entire time you are there. Just the translation process alone will take up much of the time. In the image above, you can see that there are multiple elements on a webpage that require translations. Those include the actual content of whichever page you are targeting. For example, on this blog the content would be the title of the post and the HTML content. But also requiring translation would be the various modules on the webpage, such as comments, related posts, menus, categories, etc. Each of these would also require some type of mechanism by which they can be converted. Much much work I'm afraid.
this is a big step
This blog has been my longest running project so far. And it just seems to keep going and going. I may leave it alone for a few days, or a week sometimes, but it always finds a way to sneak back in. It is both an outlet for thought and a way to share knowledge with people. Even share knowledge with myself really. There have been many a time when I've needed to remind myself on how to do something, and gleefully remember that there's a post hidden here somewhere that will show me how. So now I hope to expand that reach just a tiny bit and to digitally be a part of other parts of the world.
Walter Guevara is a software engineer, startup founder and currently teaches programming for a coding bootcamp. He is currently building things that don't yet exist.
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