Linden Lab starts to localize the website - international marketing starting?

Anyone checked out the SL Homepage lately? There is a British, German, Japanese and Korean version available now. The content seems to be a straight translation, many links lead to pages still in english. But ...

I wonder if this is a precursor for more intense international marketing activities - which I would consider a very sensible use of the fresh capital the company received lately. If this is the case we might reach 500,000 residents much earlier than December.

Makes good business sense. On a planet with 6-7/billion
people, it would be wise to expand operations beyond
the few million English speaking nations of the world.

I'm just waiting for someone to sell a universal translator.

This raises the question of how we will communicate inworld with one another when we have people who don't need to know English to access Second Life.
Might I suggest an easy, neutral language for communication across language groups? Say, Esperanto? To find out more, visit Esperantujo inworld or IM me.

Esperanto?!?!?!?! This is crazy. Just build a translator or build language specific servers. Either that or do what guildwars does, let everyone mix and ppl talk to those they understand. If korean people want to sell to me, then speaking in English is required, vice versa and I will need to speak korean. Simple as that. I will say this though, the first person to make an international interface that accesses Babelfish in SL (or something like it) is going to make a lot of money. Who knows,maybe it will even translate Esperanto =)

Marketing? My guess is that it's just some cool translation script that someone enjoyed tinkering with for a few days and managed to integrate into the website. But I'm just guessing.

Speaking an easy neutral language is not crazy. It makes good business sense. Why would you be willing to spend the 500+ hours learning Korean to reach that market, while you could master Esperanto in a fraction of the time? And as far as accessing Babelfish, machine translation is a joke for normal communication. Here's an English phrase translated into German, then back to English:
Original phrase: "You have a fantastic avatar, and I'd like to get it. Can you go down on the purchase price? By the way, your land is beautiful, and I hope you get a lot of traffic on it."
German from Babelfish: "Sie haben einen fantastischen Avatara, und ich möchte es erhalten. Können Sie unten auf den Kaufpreis gehen? Übrigens ist Ihr Land schön, und ich hoffe, daß Sie eine Menge Verkehr auf ihr erhalten."
Back to English, what did it say?:"They have a fantastischen Avatara, and I would like to receive it. Can you go down on the purchase price? By the way your country is beautiful, and I hope that you receive a quantity traffic on it."

And that's with German and English, two languages in the SAME LANGUAGE FAMILY. Results are even more dramatic taking the same phrase into Russian and back to English: "You have fantastic embodiment, and I wanted would be to obtain it. Can you go downward to the buying price? By the way, your earth is beautiful, and I hope you is obtained many motion on them."

For more fun with machine translation, check out http://www.tashian.com/multibabel/
Esperanto is a practical solution to a coming problem. Machine translation is not.

Machine translation will only get better as time goes on.

Requiring sellers and customers to learn an entirely new language isnt going to be feasible or practical. The big way to go, is making sure your products are internationalisable, so people can pick the language they want to use, and ideally, if LL can add in a llGetAvatarLanguage(), it can be done automatically. (Just do a lookup against what language the client is running under)

I want my mouth to move asynchronously when I say translated text in a foreign language.

I suspect if LL was going for an international market, they would provide a FFXI-like system for common phrases, esp. for buying and selling.

I don't think, language will be a huge problem fast. Currently you don't get very far in SL without knowing (more than) a little english. Even if we ever should have "different language sims" I guess the need for knowing english will not go away so soon.

The current localization attempts are half hearted at best. And it will be a long time until the idea of multilingual content will work in SL. There are not enough tools available for that in SL. One or two LSL funtions won't help. It took some years until we had working localization tools and architectures for software.

But ... you don't need to be fluent in english, to use SL. Having areas where the language which is spoken predominantly is your local language would make SL much more attractive to a larger target group outside the english speaking countries. People might know a bit english all over the world. But it's more relaxing for most of them to chat in the language they grw up with.

An international auxiliary language is a good idea, but I'm not that fond of Esperanto. It is completely Euro-centric and often seems chauvinist. Patro means father, and patrino means mother. Filo is son and filino is daughter. Sinjoro is Mr and Sinjorino is Mrs. The root word is always the masculine form, the female form is always a grammatical derivative.

On the other hand, it's really easy for a Westerner to learn and it's the only international auxiliary language which has any real base of speakers. And with its word building rules, Esperanto is really easy to create original profanity.

Well obviously if language becomes a barrier we should not only look at automising it. Not only the language may differ but also the culture. If for example the Korean active userbase jumps to thousands of people the solution is obvious: find yourself a Korean "employee" who helps you translate and who helps you set up shop in such a way that it appeals to Koreans.

I'm pretty sure that we'll see Anshe Chung providing adapted services for every market as soon as the need pops up. All others should try it too and the smaller business would be served by Koreans who work on a "contractor" base.

Obviously when the Koreans set up shop they'll eventually require the same services from us.

All in all, internationalisation would create new services and job oppurtunities.

The challenge of localization is not one of translating or finding someone who will act as a representative from this culture. Such services are available for cheap.

The challenge remains how to adapt inworld "content" to a userbase with many different languages. SL is not simply "software" or a website, which can be localized rather efficiently nowadays. It is more like a real world site (city, shopping mall, institution etc.). If you look at these real world examples you will see, that they all have a hard time accomodating two or more languages. Billboards or road signs in two languages can be awkward. If you try to support three or more languages it looks downright crazy.

No, I expect english to be the lingua franca of SL for quite some time to come, with other languages being used (in "content" rather sparingly in regions dominated by certain cultures. The outdoor pub in the german sims is called "beer garden" not "Bier Garten" for example. And there is a reason for that.

Well I'm currently sitting in an office in Brussels Belgium. I could walk out of the door into a shop and people will talk to me in both Dutch and French. On my way I'll pass many billboards in both languages. I can go to the trainstation and the international trains will be announced in 4 languages (Dutch, French, German and English). Likewise while on the train I'll get my info (live! not recorded) in 4 languages (sometimes more, a few people like to add Italian, Spanish, ... just for kicks while they make the announcements).

Sure it's not always easy and not everybody has trained staff. But on the other hand it does pay off to have staff that masters at least 3 languages (Dutch, French and English) and your brochures, billboards, ... must support different languages. If you are unwilling and just pick one language you end up losing business.

As soon as a significant amount of people have a different language adapting to them will help a lot. If you think it doesn't you simply have not seen any serious multilingual market.

I am living in Germany, have to go to Belgium (Brussels) on business a few times a year. That experience was exactly the reason, I was talking about having "a hard time accomodating two or more languages". In written communication it "looks downright crazy".

No, and I definitely don't want to sit in a train, where the announcer repeats everything in four languages.

Yes but you do not belong to either language community. If you'd been visiting from Paris or Amsterdam you would've found it quite convenient that you were able to read the menu, order in your own language, ... Especially for those people who do not master a foreign language this is quite essential. Do you really think somebody from Paris would prefer a menu in English over a menu in Dutch and French?

My German is pretty bad, I can understand it moderately but I would not feel comfortable having a real conversation. End result? When I plan short trips in a nearby foreign country I'll first consider England, the Netherlands and France simply because I am sure I master the respective languages. It is physicly as easy to go to Germany but it 'll be less appealing.

For SL it's essential that businesses get the tools to decide on their own. They don't need to make multilingual signs as they'll eventually have to serve people in many languages but if they would provide notecards, vending machines, ... that support the buyers native language they would greatly improve their chances on the market. If that does not happen you'll soon see that SL will be split into communities and they'll just buy in their own shops regardless of whether your product is superior or not.

Esperanto was one of those very logical and academic ideas that completely ignore practice, and so it quickly became a monumental failure.
We already have a universal language. It's called "English". In Second Life, I have spoken English with people from Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Japan, China, Brazil, Argentina...
Really. English is the new Latin. Learning it is mandatory in my country. I imagine it's also mandatory for most other "civilized" countries...

Blakar, I agree wholeheartedly. I am not sure we are discussing the same topic, though.

I did not want to deny that it is convenient for anyone to have information displayed in the language he or she is most familiar with. I did not want to deny that it makes good business sense do approach ones customers in "their language".

I was just pointing out that the solutions available for doing this tend to get awkward as soon as you have to handle more than two languages. It's still awkward to me if one of these languages is German.

Ok, I apparantly missed that part. Obviously when I suggested people should hire others to help them in setting up shop properly I did intend it to be so that the language is a selection. LL could build it or a bit of scripting could do the same. The way I see it:
LL lets each of us add a list of languages we master in our profile. And allows us to sort them based on our preferences. All you need then is a few LSL functions to query these preferences and that's that. If I then walk into a shop and put Korean as my preferred language the vendor can check it and use an adapted interface and more suitable notecards.

If LL doesn't implement this you can do pretty much the same by allowing customers to pick a language if they want to. Once one of your objects receives the info it can relay it to the nearby scripts and they can keep it stored until the customer leaves. As long as he's there he's then served in his preferred language (if it's one the store supports off course)

Interesting theory about Esperanto... have any information to back it up, or is it just an uninformed stereotype masquerading as fact? As former UN translator Claude Piron writes in "Psychological Reactions to Esperanto" available at http://esperantic.org/ced/psyres.htm , "From a century of challenges, of political and intellectual attacks, Esperanto has emerged remarkably strong, flexible, refined. " Why people have such strong opinions on a language they know next to nothing about, baffles me.
English is currently spoken by about 10% of the world's people - and that includes speakers at all levels, even beginners. I've spoken with people from many more countries than you named in Esperanto - though not in Second Life, because as most proponents of English-only SL fail to note, one must know English just to access the world (though as this thread mentions, that is changing).
Learning English is undoubtedly mandatory in many nations, just like taking foreign languages in the US is mandatory in most schools- but look at how few people actually master it, or even use it at an acceptable level. This is a pity. We are wasting a lot of time (and money) learning very difficult languages and not mastering them, when we could spend a lot less time learning a neutral, easy, and beautiful language like Esperanto. Feel free to visit Esperantujo inworld for more information or to meet some real live Esperantists.

Esperanto cant be pronounced on all tounges. Lojban is probably a better choice - it can, and the language is significantly simpler and more logical.

Either way, it's a pointless argument, you just arnt going to get customers to learn a new language to buy your products. Localisation is king.

Esperanto is spoken by 0.03% of the world's people -- taking the high end figure of two million speakers from Esperanto proponents.

I'm sorry, that train has left the station. Esperanto is Klingon without the funny rubber forehead pieces.

Wow...

Never have I seen such a lengthy discussion about Esperanto. Let alone find a handful of people who know what it is. Mentioning it in real life usually earns me a "huh?" "It's an artificial... *sighs* nevermind."

Interested me for a while, but I dont agree with setting up a situation where people would HAVE to learn it.

I'm bilingual, was fortunate enough to grow up speaking two languages at the same time. I've also worked as a translator.

As a greeter I do my best to help others who have trouble with English. I've not found one person who hadn't pretty much fully intergrated. There are groups out there, different nationalities, different languages.

People are always willing to help.

What train has left what station, Carl? Esperanto is still around, and with the shift of language dominance is a good candidate for consideration. Would you rather speak Mandarin or Hindi, or keep your English and speak Esperanto too? And by the way, 2 million speakers is no small thing - 95% of the world's 6,912 languages have fewer speakers than Esperanto, according to the Ethnologue available at http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=size

We've got to get away from our thinking that the 90% of people in the world who don't speak English can or should be marginalized in the global community or on the Internet (including Second Life). Not to mention the even higher percentage who don't speak it well - have you spoken to any telemarketers or customer service people lately?

2 million people sounds small when you look at it as percentage of the world population, indeed. But 14 US states have fewer than 2 million people (US Census). 50 countries in the world have fewer than 2 million people (worldatlas.com). And the 2 million who do speak Esperanto are divided over many countries, ready to help people who share their country's language learn Esperanto as the world's second language.

Esperanto deserves serious consideration. If there are good reasons to reject it, fine. Let's discuss those. But let's not throw it out as a joke.