This site is great. I would like to localize this site for Japanese users, firstly the system (I am not so much a life scientist to translate the contents). How should I start?
Hello and welcome, @norara!
Yes, please! Our translators work through the translatewiki project. You can register as a translator at https://translatewiki.net/, and then you can find text for EOL needing Japanese at
We enable a new language when 75% of the text is translated. Someone has done a little bit of Japanese already. Please invite your friends if you think they’d like to help. Many hands make light work 
Please let us know if you have any trouble getting started. It would be great to enable Japanese navigation on the site.
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Thanks! Nice tool.
I am skipping quite a lot of texts since I am not sure of their context. Are there any way to see where the text is used in the original site? (some can be found according to the first line like “EOL:Website-footer.eol is hosted by/ja” but some are not descriptive to me…any other hints?)
It is definitely fine to pick and choose! Neglected text may be a hint to us that our English term is not very descriptive. I wish we had a map to where the navigational text appears on the site; sometimes I don’t remember the context myself.
One segment of the texts has a particular resource available: toward the bottom, beginning with “body length”, are about 100 terms that appear in our glossary, so you can look them up if they’re ambiguous.
Suomi is available as language (65% translated) but other language with a higher translate are not:
Swedish (68%),
Dutch (71%),
Arabic(72%),
Greek (77%) are not.
Why are they not available as languague in eol.org?
| zh-hant: Traditional Chinese | 1.293 | 0 | 100% | 1% | 0% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| zh-hans: Simplified Chinese | 1.293 | 46 | 96% | 4% | 0% |
| el: Grieks | 1.293 | 295 | 77% | 0% | 0% |
| pt-br: Brazilian Portuguese | 1.293 | 307 | 76% | 3% | 1% |
| ar: Arabisch | 1.293 | 354 | 72% | 92% | 1% |
| nl: Nederlands | 1.293 | 369 | 71% | 0% | 0% |
| sv: Zweeds | 1.293 | 410 | 68% | 3% | 0% |
| fi: Fins | 1.293 | 456 | 64% | 4% | 0% |
| diq: Zazaki | 1.293 | 598 | 53% | 0% | 1% |
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And now i understand the version control mentioned ''Talen met een vertaalgraad van minder dan 25 % worden niet ingecheckt in versiebeheer. ‘’ is here…
Good question, @Optilete !
Finnish and Arabic passed 75% back when we had a smaller vocabulary available for translation. As the vocabulary got a bit larger, we tried not to disable existing languages unless they fell quite far behind.
Greek and Dutch are both newly arrived at the threshold; they will appear in our next web interface update, in the next couple of weeks. I am holding my breath for Swedish also. It came a long way quite recently.
We are expecting to expand the vocabulary one more time, fairly soon, at which point we may lower the threshold, to avoid discouraging new languages too much. A considerable amount of effort has been spent on languages that are languishing below the current threshold. Your thoughts are welcome! It is a tricky business, deciding how best to leverage all this work.
Jen
I should make a languague available if it is 35% and load it automatically if the translation threshold is 75%, depending on ip address e.g. of the visitor. If you want to translate you can not always find the context of the word or sentence… What is wrong if only a part of the website is translated? As long as the visitor always can choose his own language it is no problem at all…
Thanks for that input. As an English speaker, I have almost no experience of navigating websites in my second language. You don’t find it confusing when an interface is partly translated and partly displayed in English? I wondered whether people might not prefer to use google translate or something in cases like that- but I don’t know how well those products perform these days, especially with “specialty” language like biodiversity information.
No, but I am a translater too. It makes visible the context where the sentences come from and makes clear that probably some translations need some fine tuning. And I guess you can always change to 100% English.
Looks like Translatewiki is recently updated?
Yes, we just added the new terms. We’ll hold onto the languages we have activated already- and I’ve changed the documented threshold to 45% for now. I’m curious to see how much activity we get for the new material. It is less common website navigation and more scientific terms.
Fingers crossed!
Jen