As a bilingual person, I’ve always been very sensitive to the importance of language in people’s lives — and on the internet. I’ve gathered on my site a bunch of pointers to my musings on the subject over the past year.
Enough about me — I just wanted to give you a bit of context.
I’d like to facilitate a discussion about the issues surrounding languages on the internet. Here are some ideas, for starters:
- how important is it to internationalize your website/tool?
- what are the problems we bump into with localisation?
- doesn’t everybody speak English?
- how can we create spaces where it is OK to use more than one language at a time?
- how do we profile language skills?
- what processes and tools do we have for translation?
- beyond translating an interface, what is the “cost” (ressources, skills) of localisation?
- …
This discussion will happen informally between 10:30 and 11:00 (morning break) on Friday. I will communicate the location on Thursday.