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Future home of translations guidance and information on translated resources
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[translations] adding (in English) to non-WAI-site links ? #100

Open shawna-slh opened 3 years ago

shawna-slh commented 3 years ago

See background on links in the WAI website system here: https://www.w3.org/wiki/WAI/Translation_Instructions#Links

Should we ask translators to add "(in English)" (in the translated language of course :-)

Note: It's probable the system could automate that. If the system might automate it in the future, then better for translators not to add it. However, it's unlikely to be a priority for us to add that functionality to the system — we have many higher priorities.

We welcome input in this issue, including:

vmmiller commented 3 years ago
  1. If it can be generated automatically within WAI site, I think it's a good practice.
  2. For the user experience as well, it is useful because it signals to the user that the information is in English only so the user does not waste time to go to a link (if they don't want the information in English).
  3. For external links, it can be tedious for the translator to go and check.
  4. To reach some kind of consistency: within the WAI site, yes, I'd indicate if the link is to English and especially when the "(in English)" information is automatically generated.
r12a commented 3 years ago

This is a tricky one, and i'm not aware of a perfect solution. For i18n pages we tend to leave the reader to follow the link then hit the back key if they cannot read the target page.

You need to be careful in an environment where a target page could be translated at any time. Otherwise you could achieve the opposite of what you intended. When text that says "in English" is maintained manually it will become out of date, and will typically remain unchanged when a new translation becomes available. Then the impulse and learned experience of the user to not follow links to pages in (in this case) English will mean that they miss out on content that is actually in their own language.

If language information is manually created, not only is it a chore to change all links, everywhere, that declare the wrong language information every time a new translation is created, but it is likely that you won't be able to easily find all the relevent places that need to be changed.

Furthermore, if the target page is available in other languages than English, you don't necessarily want to suggest to the reader that the page is only available in English. A large percentage of people around the world are multilingual, rather than bilingual, and they may be happy to read content in another language that is available rather than (in this case) English. How will they know if that is available?

If an automated solution can be applied, that would be useful, but it should probably show the range of translations available, rather than just suggest that a page is available only in English.