Forums / Maintenance / Suggest Ideas

Has anyone considered making articles available in other languages? It might help to have the articles here also available in Portuguese and Russian and other languages and whatnot.

This is actually a really great idea. Of course, we'd need people to actually translate them, and not just Google Translate. I remember there was a Google Doc ages ago showing what languages the various mods spoke, so here's what there was in it (I'll keep this updated):

• Katie_C: French
• mona_jpn: Japanese (native language)
• Mr J: Mandarin (native language), Spanish
• opspe: Spanish, French, some Portuguese, some Italian
• Platus: French, German
• RandomMan: Dutch (native language), some German
• Tomberry: French (native language)
• Triple Z: Spanish (native language), Portuguese, Italian
• Brucker: Spanish, some German, some Hebrew
• MDFification: some French, some Gaelic, some Latin
• BSoD: some Spanish, some German, some Maori
• Teh Brawler: Japanese, some Spanish
• Oclaf: Greek (native language)
• Cyber6x: some Japanese, some Hindi

I know that I can provide Spanish and French translations without difficulty. So if any other users can help, please post here!

I agree with this. People should be able to switch between languages on the site. Sort of like on Wikipedia.

I can help provide French. I'm not awesome at it, but I can help.

We can use Google Translate for some things, but anyone who uses it must be able to understand the grammar.

I'd love to see some good Japanese translators though, we can't improvise around that.

If them foreigners want to read KYM so badly, they can read it the right way: in American!

Damn, completely forgot Mona! Updated.

Anyways, I would advise against using Google Translate for anything. If it has to be used, the translations should always be checked by someone who actually speaks the language.

There is one difficulty though, we have a lot of entries. If you want to make them available in different languages, you'll have to consider how far you'll take it. Are you only aiming for the entries which originated in that country? Do only the biggest entries which cover the biggest subcultures or events? Things like that.

Updated Opspe's post to change "German" with me to "some German". I can understand it, but not exactly fluently.

First we should aim for memes that originated in that country, then ones relevant to that country, then everything else.

Seconded.

Related: Regional Internet Meme Research Project

Also, add Dutch to the list of languages.

It's doubtful if it contributes to KYM's benefit, but multiple language support sounds like a good idea.

However, even if KYM supports multiple languages, We won't be allowed to accept original entries in non-English languages. That's because we, especially staffs, can't weigh the notability of what the articles says. To keep the quality of the database, entry translation would be better be limited in confirmed entries.

This is a very good point, thanks for mentioning it. Submissions should stay English-only.

@opspe:

I wasn't aware such a document existed. I'm out-of-practice fluent in Spanish, know some basics of German and Hebrew, and know enough to be of some help in Japanese, Korean, French, and Italian.

I don't know that we need to be so ambitious as to translate all our entries into multiple foreign languages, especially with the size of the pool of active editors we have, but for instance, it might make a lot of sense to have the Brazilian meme entries translated to Portuguese.

This is a neat idea. My French is solid enough that I could probably translate an article, but my German is laughable, so that won't work.

As for which articles to translate, we should come up with some kind of priority list of confirmed entries that we think would a) be notable enough that translation would be beneficial, and b) are short/simple enough that a translation would be quick. Large articles, like the one for MLP, would probably have to be divided into parts, as it would take a long time for one person to translate the whole thing. While, obviously, any important articles that are also very short should be taken care of quickly.

Also, we might want to prioritize articles that are likely to remain stable or unchanged for a long time, as the translations would have to be updated along with the main versions.

Umm…I never said I speak Dutch. RandomMan is Dutch.

Oh, and for more people's language skills, there's this: https://knowyourmeme.com/forums/general/topics/14769-differenze-linguistiche-dkym

@Platus:

You know, while I like the idea of translating articles, I've noticed that there are a lot of older articles that could use some real English TLC. They may have been good enough three years ago, but look pretty crappy compared to our shiny, new articles. (Of course rather than complaining, I should just clean them up, shouldn't I?)

@Katie C.:

Don't be modest; I bet you're fluent in over six million forms of communication…

I propose we translate only pages with non-english origins and a small number of very notable, very internationally-spread memes.

I volunteer to do Spanish.

Soy capaz, dispuesto, y listo. Sólo traducción, ¿verdad? No soy mago del diseño.

In my opinion, the first good step is to translate entries which have episode videos, and give each language subtitles to those videos. If possible, those subbed videos had better be uploaded to popular video sharing services in each regions not only to YouTube.

Of course, Serious Business's idea also sounds good.

In any case, if KYM begins multilingual support, much more bilingual people will be needed to keep running the project. We'll have to do sort of advertising campaigns for recruiting new talents.

Good idea. Here are links to each of the pages for the most recent 55-or-so episodes, which brings us back to 2010.

Wait, where do we put the translated articles? Are we just stuffing them behind a spoiler tag? It seems it would be nice to have a special place, like: regular article at "/memes/pokemon" and then we have links to "/memes/pokemon/es", "/memes/pokemon/de", "/memes/pokemon/jp", etc, but that's up to our Cheezburger overlords probably, right?

That's one of the things I'm thinking, it would be best if these alternate articles were placed professionally, rather than just linked from the original to a separate, translated article. By this, I'm saying what you're saying, that it would be a good idea if you could switch from the original English to a translated alternate page in the same place, if you see what I mean, rather than having them separately.

Perhaps we could put them in original entries in the same way we link sub-entires to the parent?

I can probably translate alot of articles in Swedish. As long as they aren't painstakingly long like the MLP one. Not because the English is difficult, it's just too much work in quantity.