Website Internationalization

So far, all of the content on this website is in English. I will likely publish some Japanese articles in the future, however. There are various ways to implement internationalization (“i18n”) on websites. This blog entry is about my plans for this website.

While my plans for this website are very simple, I started writing an overview of things that should be considered in general. That overview ended up being longer than I had planned, so I am publishing it as a separate article: Website Internationalization. Note that I will likely improve on the article in the future.

Since this website is a personal website, I do not plan on internationalizing the user interface. I do not plan on translating most content , though I will likely translate certain articles to multiple languages. I am implementing some internationalization functionality in the website software.

• Content can be associated with locales.
• Article and blog metadata has support for multiple authors, translators, and proofreaders, making it easy to give appropriate attribution.
• Each contributor can be tagged as native or non-native. This can warn readers that my Japanese is not native, for example, in case it is not immediately obvious…
• Translation metadata makes it easy to provide links to translations.

My priority for this site, however, is making it easy for people to discover content in non-English languages. Since the vast majority of the content is in English, I do not think it is worthwhile to index all languages. In this case, I think it is best to simply use the existing tagging system. For example, a Japanese article can be tagged with meta:japanese. A user who is reading a Japanese article can then easily click on the tag to discover all other articles written in Japanese. Note that this tag is distinct from a language:japanese tag, used to tag content about the Japanese language.