Translation into other languages - Spanish should be a priority - would allow cyclists who are disproportionately victims of bicycle theft to use Bike Index.
This should be discussed in the issue tracker. It appears that providing translations for Spanish was a top priority for @seth, but I don’t know what happened since then.
Hey @Thomas_Proctor - thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, we don’t have the resources to do a good job at translating the site into Spanish. Using the Google translate site functionality is a better bet.
@Steve_Piercy we added a Dutch translation - it’s a bunch of work to maintain, and the majority of the translation is actually provided by Google Translate anyway (our translator stopped having time to work on the project). There are some chunks of the site that aren’t translated at all - which from what I’ve seen, means the end result is worse than if you just used google site translate in the first place.
Ultimately, translating a website is a huge project! Particularly since Bike Index is continuing to add functionality, keeping up with the changes is no small task.
Yup. It all hinges on a human who is bilingual to do a better job than Google Translate. The amount of effort outweighs the negligible benefit.
That said, Google took a dump on almost all website owners by ending support of the Google Translate widget, and telling them to use Chrome instead. It appears however that there is an exemption for non-profit organizations.
https://support.google.com/translate/answer/2534559?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform=Desktop
Or we could put the Mexico flag on the upper right corner to use Google Translate. The URL GET parameters are easy enough to decipher.
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=en&tl=es&u=https://bikeindex.org/
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=en&tl=es&u=https://bikeindex.org/
I’m not sure it’s very useful to suggest how to automatically translate a websites to users.
From what I’ve seen, people who don’t speak English are pretty adept at figuring out how to get automatic translations and have their own preferred method of doing so.
Since we don’t offer anyone other than dutch speakers a better experience than an automated translation, I worry that suggesting something (e.g. google translate) will make them think we have something to offer when we don’t.
I’m open to being convinced otherwise though!
Since Bike Index ostensibly serves all of North America, there’s an argument for other-than-English language development - Spanish (for Mexico), French (for parts of Canada), and for other languages. That said, the web-site maintenance task, alone, is likely cost-prohibitive for such a complex, and labor-intensive effort, multiplexed across multiple languages. I get it. If I could influence on-line bike registry services (Bike Index, Project 529 Garage, law enforcement dBases, manufacturer registrations, etc.), I’d lobby for nonlinguistic symbology (Photos, Images, Illustrations, Graphics, whatever) to REMOVE AND REPLACE as much language as is reasonably feasible, so that the registry services are available to as many different languages/cultures as possible, on a global scale. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” For example, to define Frame Serial Number for a bike mainframe, I can imagine a graphic with an Arrow pointing to the typical mainframe locations where FSN data is found, and a User-prompt to fill-in-a-blank Input Field. A chart with images of various types of handlebars could be developed for point-and-click selection by Users creating new Registry records. I might be dreaming, but this seems logical (to me), for limitless, borderless future growth and propagation of bike registry data. Continental AG includes printed instructions on packaging for new tires which explains how to remove a tire, inner-tube, and rim-liner, then re-install replacement components, and properly inflate the inner-tube to tire side-wall specifications - All without a single word of German (native), or obscure non-Euro-continental “foreign” languages, such as English. It can be done, but requires a long-term, and inclusive (i.e. GLOBAL) world-view. If philosophy continues to driven by an English-only mind-set (perfectly understandable for Oregon HQ, by the way), then this will always continue to be a self-perpetuation limitation to User growth and adoption, in my experience. Zero-language is likely NOT feasible. If I was in-charge, I’d have brief GREETINGS in the worlds most-common languages, and as much language-free detail content as possible. For Users who do not find their language-of-preference among a Drop-Down Menu selection, they are free to use Google Translate (or other resources). It’s a paradigm-shit, so perhaps a long “reach”, but the improvements could be made incrementally, with a long-term goal to achieve a more universally accessible registry experience. My $0.02
Firefox and several other web browsers do offer amazingly good support to translate any text to your language.
So just shoot with your native language. But maybe you can add a prefix such as [BR] for the title, indicating the language you use or country you refer to