websites with multiple language options?

[snow_44]

I've tried to look if this topic has come up before but haven't found anything! I have noticed that there are some other people also interested in languages though so I hope someone will want to give their own two cents on this!

What I mean specifically are websites with the option to toggle between languages (not coding languages, spoken ones!) and some different questions surrounding them!

Like, is it worth the trouble to translate your own website? For example I'd like to have a toggle between english and at least german in the future to make it accesible for friends/family, but my site will also probably be pretty small.. if you have a big site which you update often, I can imagine that keeping up with the translations would kind of double the work (Feel free to correct me if this is just because I'm a newbie  )

Having multiple language options of course makes your site accessible to a lot more people, but what I've seen of the small web is pretty english centered, would people who benefit from it even find the site? (there are probably webcrafting communities centered around other languages that I just haven't found yet, how big is the overlap there?)

And if you personally had the option to choose between viewing a page in english or your first language (assuming it's not english of course ) would you choose your first language or stick with english?
Personally, if my browser auto-translates an english website I'm automatically changing it back as soon as possible, I don't even know why!   

I think for many of us multilingual people the internet has become a very english place and maybe even more disconnected from the real world due to the language difference; I've seen many people for example talk about themselves/their feelings online using english and then say they would never do so in their first language! Does that also apply to webcrafting? Personal websites often tend to be very.. well.. personal!

What're your thoughts on this topic? Are there other problems or advantages I didn't think of? Oh! And I'm curious if you would add different language options to your sites if you had the time? Or do you even maybe already do so? (I wanna check them out if that's the case!)

[JINSBEK]

That's an interesting point about people who say they would rather prefer to publish their feelings online in English rather than their mother tongues ever! I knew, well, dated, one person like that. Or possibly I knew two, because I suspect her best friend, who had been a mutual acquaintance of ours, was also the same way. For various reasons those two had found themselves largely isolated from the rest of society (abuse and trauma, queerness, neurodiversity, therefore social anxiety) and thus most of their social life--because it did not really exist locally--was online, in English, rather than embodied/IRL, in Swedish.

I can relate in a similar way, inverse. English is really my native tongue, since my mother refused to teach me any of the languages she or my father spoke in order to Americanise me as thoroughly as possible (I was born outside of the United States and we were preparing to move there--we emigrated when I was the age of 4). For numerous reasons I found English a traumatic language. When you look at how it's organised in my brain, historically, it's been very haywire and I actually am now working very hard to fix it and reorganise it with an actual healthy, non-traumatised affective processing. It hurt to speak in English, it hurt to think in English, it definitely hurt to hear English. The only exception was reading, because reading for me, was not bound up with anything hurtful--I read for pleasure. (And the movies I watched--and the BBC. For context, I live in America, so watching the BBC was entirely of my own conscious volition.) Speaking and being spoken to, on the other hand? There was always something bad on the other end of it. I started learning Japanese on my own when I was eleven. I was very happy with that language and it felt more natural to me, and it and every language I've learned after English are all organised far better in my brain than English itself--the wonderful product of non-disordered, varied and rich affect. It was only later in life, after I turned 21, that I finally became exposed to English in situations I did not find painful, hurtful, or dangerous, and now I pride myself on my oratory and my mastery of what is technically my mother tongue.

My fiancee @VioletHeaven finds herself in a similar situation. Technically, her mother tongue is English, as her parents refused to teach her Chinese. English is as disordered and painful for her as it was historically for me; I was her first positive English relation. As a result, she has rapidly lost most of her Australian accent and sounds largely American. (As a side note, because of my formative and volitional BBC exposure, I often lack an American accent and if I become truly angry I suddenly switch into a very heavy Glaswegian accent.) She finds learning Japanese easy and pleasurable and it is much more organised in her brain--non-disordered affect--than English is. What she is looking forward most to about Japanese is speaking it to me, because for us, it is still a lot more "natural" and pleasurable than English. English for is still is very affectively constrained. It takes great, strenuous effort for the shallow woodgrain of English to reach the depth, breadth, and complexity of our affective reasoning and reality. My fiancee is younger than me, so it will probably be easier for her to "mend" English in her brain, but I don't think she has much interest in it at the moment, haha.

I wonder if the relations you've mentioned find themselves in environments where they are unable to more freely relate to, and express themselves, in their mother tongue.

When I was active on Twitter I found it much more comfortable to Tweet in Italian, Corsican, Czech, and of course Japanese. I'm not sure why I never Tweeted in Spanish, but I would reply to other Spanish Tweets in Spanish.

[arcus]

My native language is English. I don't hate the language itself, but I am bitter over its effects on other languages, including what should have been one of my native languages.

My site is in a few different languages. Esperanto being the main one. Nothing is translated, partly because it feels weird translating myself, and partly because the point is to help promote other languages. It's very niche, yet out of the blue I've recieved compliments on my site. You'll need to use this to view the Esperanto side: https://portal.mozz.us/

Even if your site doesn't get many German speaking visitors, the few that will find it will be very happy.

Having multiple language options of course makes your site accessible to a lot more people, but what I've seen of the small web is pretty english centered, would people who benefit from it even find the site? (there are probably webcrafting communities centered around other languages that I just haven't found yet, how big is the overlap there?)

Generally, through word of mouth, through other site's links, and through webrings. Neocities and Nekoweb have a searchable keyword system, you can tag your site with "deutsch" for discovery. On the Japanese side, there are communities with their own listing sites and search engines. Lony is one of them.

And if you personally had the option to choose between viewing a page in english or your first language (assuming it's not english of course ) would you choose your first language or stick with english?

If it's a language I can read, I'll read it in the writer's native language. I'll sometimes check the english version as well to compare them.

[VioletHeaven]

Jinsbek already expressed my feelings on the topic of being more comfortable expressing my feelings and even myself as a person in my non-mother tongue (Japanese), so I'd like to answer your main question!

I would prefer to view websites in English, personally, just because I cannot yet read Japanese fluently (work in progress...!) but when I am fluent, I'm sure I'd rather read a very emotion-heavy page in Japanese. Even with my beginner-level understanding of the basics of
Hiragana and spoken Japanese, I can already express and understand emotion in much greater depth than I can in English... while Jinsbek may be right (he often is!) that it'll be easier for me to mend my relationship with English, I'd rather focus on expanding my emotional horizons through Japanese first.

So, that naturally leads me to prefer reading pages in Japanese on the internet over English, because I can understand a much greater emotional depth than I could normally in my "mother tongue".

Also, when I do become fluent, I'll definitely rewrite my landing page in Japanese and set that as default (with a switch, of course). I think the essay section does better in English out of personal preference, but I am quite active in the Japanese Bunny community and I'd like to share my affection for rabbits with everyone there, too!

I always appreciate it when I see a website with multiple language options. Usually, it means the creator put special care and attention into the second or third languages, and that kind of effort means a lot!

[ValyceNegative]

Heyo! Fellow non-native English speaker here. X3
It's important to also consider that real life of nowadays is much more centered on collectivity and connecting with other cultures, so knowing two or even more languages can come in handy in plenty of occasions.

I found myself producing printed artbooks as bilingual projects (pages had both italian and english paragraphs) to reduce costs and times of production and to sell the same volume both in local and more international conventions; I knew that writing in Italian would have been a must for a pysical item to sell in my own territory, but when it comes to a virtual place where there are no limits to how much you can produce along with no limits on the nationality of your viewers, English is the best option to reach everyone, as (as you noticed) it's pretty much the "official" language of the net. So you could view it this way: you're not translating your English site to German to reach out to a smaller audience; rather, you are translating your German thoughts into English to reach out to a wider public.

If you have a small site or are just starting with one, translating your pages now instead of waiting for later could be the best route: this way, your workload to translate is always limited to the new pages you just updated and will never be overwhelming. As for its utility, considering all that's been said above, it's completely up to you. You mentioned that automatic browser translators aren't the best, I don't like them either infact, but I've seen people use them and while they're not perfect they still can make that least sense for people to get the basic jist of it.

[Cobra!]

I’m natively bilingual in Scots and English, and I also know Scottish Gaelic and Italian.

As someone born in a country still ruled by England and has historically seen many attempts at eroding our culture and language to make us speak theirs, I very much resent English, and if given the option to speak to someone else in another language listed above, I take it.

My site, and my creations, are primarily in Scots, with versions available in the other languages. (Which reminds me, I need to fix the missing language selector on my personal site that got lost after my most recent redecoration).

My goal in general is to de-anglicise where I live, and make the internet more linguistically diverse. I also help out with the Scots Wikipedia.

It is a lot of effort to make multiple language versions of anything I post, but I’m too determined in my goals to let that stop me.
Though on my personal site, I sometimes just leave some pages in Scots or in simple enough English that anyone could understand it.

Side note, but I stumble across many Americans who claim to have ancestry leading back here, but it’s usually in the context of them learning our languages. Those kinds of people usually have a bad rep over here, but I’m happy they’re using that obsession to doing something productive!

[CoolKid575]

English is my native language, but I plan on translating my all my articles into Spanish and adding a Spanish language toggle when I become proficient enough to do so. Eventually I'd like to switch to doing it the other way around as well, writing in Spanish and translating to English later. The added accessibility is a nice bonus, but the main reason is that I feel very alienated from American culture and want to distance myself as much as possible from it.