How about making this community multilingual?

You might (or not) know that I've been doing quite a lot of thinking and research about multilingualism online (search for "multilingual" on my blog), and one thing I've been dreaming of is a truly multilingual support community.

Satisfaction strikes me as a great opportunity for this. There are quite a lot of strategic/technical issues I'm not going to detail here (yes, it's complicated), but I really think the web needs more spaces where "language management" is close to what it is in real people's lives -- not just a series of linguistic silos.

Customers are not all English-speaking -- and as most people are multilingual, it doesn't really make sense to break up the communities by language.

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The company has this in progress.

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Thor Muller, Official Rep, replied on April 23, 2009 23:36
Hi all,
we are actively planning our localization and multilingual strategy. All this feedback is incredibly helpful. While I don't have a target release date at this point, we're looking at a phased approach to releasing features that support this. If anybody in this topic has direct experience with this localization process I'd love to talk with you separately. I'm thor at getsatisfaction.com

I’m excited

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Thor Muller, Official Rep, replied on September 27, 2007 15:58
First off, we're already seeing some non-English language communities adopt Satisfaction. See Eskwela [http://getsatisfaction.com/eskwela], a Filipino organization.

We are indeed very interested in this very topic, as you can see from Scott's post above. I agree with you, Steph, that this represents a huge opportunity. From my standpoint, the current lower priority of this focus has less to do with technical issues and more to do with the fact that we're in the "figuring out the business" stage. We have a lot to do to have a complete product and business model in one language before we tackle the broader challenge you describe.

But--good news--we're dealing with Internet time here, so hopefully we'll have more to discuss before too long.

I’m a very poor French speaker, but I enjoy French films

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Thor Muller, Official Rep, replied on April 17, 2008 16:34
Get Satisfaction supports any language that uses Latin characters. If you'd like to localize the interface for your language you can do so by using out API (http://developers.getsatisfaction.com). Let us know if you need help getting started by emailing eric [at] getsatisfaction [dot] com.

We hope to support non-Latin characters in the future.

I’m a globetrotter wannabe

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Eivind Ingebrigtsen replied on August 27, 2009 15:05
Create a language api - then the community will extend it.

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Luc Legay replied on February 04, 2009 09:20
I need absolutly a French version. The most simple is to allow the (admin) user of GetSatisfaction to edit all the english content, to make their own translation. Thanks !

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NRKbeta replied on October 23, 2008 07:20
Also, let us do the translation for you - just as Facebook does with every new language. Make a table and let us fill in the words for the languages we need.

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NRKbeta replied on October 23, 2008 07:11
Yes, I know it's possible to do with the API. But what I would like is an option to set Get Satisfaction in a preferred language for a certain company or product.

So when (example) a Norwegian company makes a Get Satisfaction account, all pages for THAT company are Norwegian, unless the user are actively changing it back to English.

Also, I would liked the widget to be multilanguage. "Feedback" doesn't cut ity for some of our users.

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lucas replied on October 08, 2008 20:57
hi all,
some thoughts on this:

- Steph's idea seems to be more on having a localized interface than on having a "multilingual community". And, as Chuck and others mention, a localized interface is key for third-party companies that want to provide a "getsatisfaction" experience on their non-english sites. Pointing users from a, say, Spanish product interface to an English one is a no-go (even more when the English site is supposed to be the one where users would go in order to get support with technical issues). That is the main reason I don't consider GetSatisfaction as an option at this moment.

- once a localized interface is available, the real issue becomes the quality and availability of the support for each language. And that, IMHO, is something that does not fall under the getsatisfaction product/team, but more on the third-party company using the getsatisfaction platform. While the getsatisfaction team would provide tools/features (like the "translate this question" one mentioned before), there would still be some language-specific questions that would demand a native to provide an answer/solution on behalf of the product using the getsatisfaction platform.

- from my comment above, thus, I would suggest the getsatisfaction team to create a "localization & internationalization" section, where users interested in this subject could provide ideas and feedback about features/tools that would make it easier to create their own localized support sites.

- unfortunately, from my experience, it is hard to create a true multilingual site, where questions and answers get accurately translated only by the community. Third-party companies using the getsatisfaction platform would still need to offer local-language support (which could be covered by, ideally, customer care reps --employees or contractors--, or, depending on each case, by power users willing to help other users). It's very unlikely that companies wanting to offer localized support, using the getsatisfaction solution or their own, will ever be able to avoid the a) translation costs, b) need for local support reps, and c) an internationalization/localization team (or, at the very least, a l10n/i18n project manager).

my 2 € cents :-)

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Leslie Chicoine replied on September 27, 2007 19:08
Hot and bothered by human powered translation eh?

Another interesting aspect of this is that language can never fully translate, because cultures can never fully translate. So I really like the idea of this being driven by human translation, Google Translate for example, would definitely miss key context issues that need to be further explained, like the actual tone of a conversation.

A very cool extension could be built out with the API. Say there's a [translate this!] button and anyone who goes and translates a topic or a reply gets rewards similar to what we have planned for basic participation (like giving a really helpful answer). Then maybe in your own preferences you can ask to see certain languages, and we filter up those things for you. I'd love to find a way to do this that allows people from many cultures and languages to interact, not just silo one language from another like is normally the case on the web.

I’m brushing up on my Japanese

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