It’s useful if you have a multi-lingual group at your centre or contributing to your site to know that WordPress comes in many different languages.
The user interface can be translated by going to your settings page in WordPress. All the layout will be the same and a few of the words will not translate, so it’s still easy for an experienced WordPress user to use the Dashboard once translated, or it can be changed back again on the Settings page.
And if you want to type in a different language but don’t have easy access to the right keyboard you can use this virtual keyboard to type and copy text in and Google’s powerful translation tools can be used to translate back and forth. These translations won’t be perfect, but are improving through the efforts of volunteers worldwide. They are really useful for quickly gaining an understanding of what someone has written or overcoming language barriers by email.
So instead of just Hello World you can now have Helo byd, Tere maailm or مرØبا العالم! in seconds!
Update: see also this useful guide to transliteration, from WordPress.
- Three ways to use Facebook in your community - 4th September 2011
- Public and private spheres: building zones in Facebook - 1st July 2011
- Getting more attention – tagging and understanding notifications - 15th June 2011
It’s interesting to see other people tackling the language barrier in a different setting!
The Pan-European eParticipation Network blog (http://www.pep-net.eu) blog has flags for different European languages that you can click to read articles only in a certain language. My colleague (Bengt) sorted out the details, but I know you can tag articles with the language they’re written in (e.g inenglish, initalian etc.).