We’ll be stepping up to the table to replace Glenda Sims aka Glenda the Goodwitch and Steph Troeth (a tough double act to follow if ever there was one) who have done an amazing job creating a dynamic group of international web standards advocates. Glenda is moving on to be a WaSP co lead while Steph is getting more involved in the Education Task Force who are doing amazing work on the Curriculum Project . Glenda and Steph – you’ll be missed!

To give you some background ILG is an international collective of web professionals promoting the global use of standards to ensure an equitable Web. objectives of the group are:

• Discuss with and inform the public about Web standards and accessibility issues as they relate to the practices and laws within particular countries and/or regions
• Publish multilingual educational information
• Provide resources about Web standards through such outreach as blogs, books, articles, presentations, code, design, vision and leadership
• Internationalize relevant documents and resources for the public use
• Encourage and invigorate international discussion about the Web
• Study how the Web is and will be used in a global context

For translations of these objectives visit the translations of ILG goals and objectives page.

Having worked in the group for over a year now I’ve been lucky enough to get to know many of the fifty plus members who are located all over the world. They’re an impressive bunch of people and I can’t wait to get more involved. Come September I’ll be travelling more; attending conferences and on tours, and I hope to meet more folks, not just from ILG but involved in web standards everywhere, in person and learn more about what is going on in various countries and regions.

I find it interesting that Japanese is the first language that the site has been localised in but as Twitter reported in their blog they were noticing a high volume of users and Twitters originating from Japan which drove them in their decision to localise into Japanese. This is very much in keeping with what I’ve heard elsewhere about social networking sites: you never know what region your site is going to take off in so site owners tend to internationalise and localise into languages where they already have market share rather than where they want to build a presence. Both Facebook and Flickr have followed this path.

What is really great is that by releasing translated versions social networking sites are really putting internationalisation back on the agenda for website owners and developers in general. Previously internationalisation was the domain of global corporates where as now it’s more relevant to sites we use more regularly.

To see the Japanese version you’ll need to select the Japanese option from the drop down select box. Not a great idea as many Japanese users may not understand what “Select language” means. Ideally Twitter should code the English and Japanese as HTML text and remove the drop down. Translating the TITLE of the page would also help wannabe Japanese Twitterers.

I’ve not checked it out under the bonnet but if you have leave a comment and let everyone know what you think.

Natural language is the default language of the page and is indicated by providing the lang and/or xml:lang attribute in the html elements. The main language of the page needs to be indicated in the header with any changes in language coded within the body. So, if you are browsing search results in an English page that had a couple of search results in French lang=fr would be wrapped around the French text so that it can be picked up as French.

In terms of internationalisation this is important so that search engines can read text correctly, text and scripts can be rendered correctly and text can be more easily translated.

The accessibility benefits are also huge as coding language properly allows braille translation software to substitute control codes for accented characters and screen readers that support multiple languages to speak in the appropriate accent with proper pronunciation.

In their blog post announcing the news that their search now support language changes Yahoo! have added in a few recordings of before and after pages with language not coded and coded. This is really handy as people often ask me what a screen readers says when language has been coded.

Read and listen to Yahoo! search now supports natural language.

Find out more about the LANG attribute in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 and using the LANG attribute to identify changes in language.

Wikipedia describes crowdsourcing as “the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call”. This is an approach which is very similar to how Wikepedia itself crowdsources content. In the context of translation of a website this means simply inviting your users to offer translations of your templates and content.Large corporates, small companies or organisations all face the problem of translation. Even when there is a budget for translation there is often still an issue of quality control. One organisation I spoke to said that all translated text could only be published on their site once it had gone though four rounds of edits. Costly both in time and man hours. The reason for such extensive edits was to ensure that translated text was checked for literal translations that were out of context. A couple of the stranger examples given were”crowded camp” instead of “concentration camp” and “Enter” written in a sexually suggestive way in Russian for a submit button.

So when does crowdsourcing translation work? In the corporate world this is unlikely to be a huge hit for a number of reasons. Firstly it may not be the route that a large organisation wants to go down as they may have a strong house style and brand that needs to be stuck to. The bigger issue, to my mind at least however, is that people are going to be less likely to want to offer translations of sites such as these as they have no real stake hold in the sites and typically are not emotionally invested in these sites.

Crowdsourcing really comes into it’s own when you think of it in a social networking context. Sites such as Flickr, Facebook and WordPress have communities of users that are hugely passionate about what they consider to be their sites given that content is contributed to and generated by themselves. They therefore have a real interest in feeding into the translation process.

Facebook openly crowdsources translation by rolling out a loose translation of the site (some have claimed by using Babelfish) and then letting the users do the rest. Indeed the final French version of the site was rolled out on Sunday 9th March and almost immediately I spotted this status update from a French friend of mine: “Frederique is trying out facebook in French and is having a good laugh”. Facebook would do well to get her feedback as she is a translator by trade and has worked on translating series such as Sex in the City and now translates games. You can’t really get much better than that!

Crowdsourcing translation for blogs also fascinates me. I love the idea that a reader spots a post that resonates and inspires them and then goes to translate it. There are a number of plugins that the humble blogger can use to support translation of their own content. Worldwide Lexicon is a site that supports collaborative translation and has a plugin for WordPress: the plugin enables your readers and volunteers to view, create and edit translations to any languages they speak. This is something I’m definitely going to try out.

So what do you think? Is crowdsourcing translation the way to go for you?

Finally if you weren’t able to make it to SXSW you’ll be able to catch some of the panel discussions podcasted via the SXSW site. I’ll be posting about these together with any slides made available as they get published.

Internationalization? Localization? Beyond these clumsy buzzwords is the global reality. Hear world designers and developers share firsthand experiences with international best practices and Web standards. Learn technical infrastructure principles for creating sites with the flexibility to be global while keeping visual designs sensitive to regional needs.

We’ll be looking at some of the challenges and benefits of building sites for international audiences as well as exploring the relationship between internationalisation and accessibility.

Kick off is Sunday, 3.30 to 4.30 – hope to see you there!