User generated content in multilingual enviorments brings up new internationalizations problems,
in a social network or other enviorment with a lot of User Generated content, I18N could not be sticked strictly to the user, and even a content or discussion could be spreaden through different languages.
On usual websites a language is assigned to the frontend user, also on
Youtube where it causes some problems.
I always recieve Mails like
Komentarze do filmu „>videoname<”
Comentario sobre ">videoname<" publicado
Reactie van >userwhopostedcomment< op ,>videoname<'
Nouveau commentaire sur ">videoname<"
Kommentar zu ">videoname<" gepostet" gepostet
Which all mean your video ... has been commented by ..., but it´s alsways in the default language to the commentor, no matter what my language is and no matter which language the comment is Written in. Comments itself are mostly written in english or the language the video is in.
A solution could be to send it just in the recipient´s default language instead the actual frontend language, it would just make it easier for the recipient.
Jeroen
- Moie Video, echt Leuk
Tommy
- Why are all the Comments in Dutch
Franz
- Die Holländer finden ihre Sprache so Toll
Antje
- Ihre Sprache ist auch Supertoll
Joost
- Duits is alleen voor Moffen
Tommy
- In English Please
Joost
- German is for Kauts Only
Franz
- Geh doch Käse essen du Kaaskopp
As you see users could communicate through different Languages, and maybe they even like it and switch Languages during a conversation,
if you wanna run your site with an international flavour this is acceptable.
Language Detection
Language Detection could be usefull, to translate auto detection for example, but you could also hide content with Language Detection
For Example: I got a Guestbook entry on my Dutch
Netlog, somebody commentet the guestbook in German with something like "Hi ich habe ein bischen Deutsch gelernt, Wie geht es dir? viele grüsse". This entry were hidden cause it weren´t written in my actual frontend Language (Dutch),
but actually i had choosen German as native language in my profile.
So if you use something like Language Detection to hide content from foreign Languages, you must consider a user could be able to understand more than one language.
Hiding content from the user is mostly a bad decission, cause even if the user is not able to read information might be usefull.
The better way is always to sign the entry as an entry with different language and offer automated translation possibility.
Where it could make sense to hide content is if a user is doing a general search on contents, at least in order of the search results.