In the last 48 hours, flickr, the successful photography website has rolled out user interfaces in multiple languages, including Chinese, Korean, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Portuguese. This translation of interfaces has long been a strong-point of open source, because of the ability of native speakers to contribute their own translations incrementally. I suspect that in the case of commercial services the payment processing and localisation of legal issues are almost as much work as the translation of text. In the case of flickr, many of the licensing issues are simplified by the fact that the creative commons has already translated both their licences and their “plain English” explanations into a wide variety of languages.
It will be interesting to see how the much-vaulted flickr tagging system copes with the sudden influx of multiple languages. In some communities there is long standing cross-language tagging and it will be interesting to see whether this continues, or whether each language community goes their own way.
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