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Guest Giorgio

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Guest Giorgio

Hi, I'm from Germany and wondering why Geocaching isn't booming the way it did and does in the USA. (only 18 caches for a pop of 80 million is not much ....)

 

One reason might be the language barrier. Not everybody speaks English well enough to get all information or even to understand what geocaching is all about. On the other hand, I feel that English should be the main language on the German pages, too (for keeping this thing international and also thinking about cross-border cache-tourism etc).

 

So my question to everyone and especially to Jeremy is: Would it be feasible to have the cache description in several languages (english being one of them)? I could of course post a link in my cache description to a private german cache page, but I feel that the whole geocaching information should best be kept and maintained in one place. Don't know if this has been discussed before.

 

Would be interested to hear your reflections on this.

 

Greetings,

Juergen aka Giorgio from Stuttgart/Germany

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Guest jeremy

This is probably a good place for it.

 

I've actually been looking into multi-language caches today, so it's a pretty interesting coincidence.

 

Some folks do have an English and French/Spanish/etc. translation listed for caches. It isn't the standard, though it would be nice.

 

I'm certainly open to alternate translation sites if people want to mirror the FAQs and translations of a lot of sections of the site. To be truly global I've been looking into double byte languages also to ensure that they're covered. Unfortunately I'm new to the whole multiple language scene so it may take a bit for me to catch up - also the work involved in setting it up.

 

Ultimately it would be nice to recognize the primary language of the browser and redirect to the appropriate page, whether hosted on Geocaching.com or elsewhere.

 

Jeremy

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Guest Silver

One way to do it would be to post a link on all non-english cache sites to the free translation service on Alta Vista. You can type text or a web's URL into this site http://babelfish.altavista.com/ and it will translate it for you.

 

Of course, a machine translation program can only go so far. "I got skunked on this one", "I started too late and blew it", and "This was a piece of cake" might not quite mean the same after going through the babelfish. Just remember to bring your towel. icon_smile.gif

 

Silver

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Guest Silver

One way to do it would be to post a link on all non-english cache sites to the free translation service on Alta Vista. You can type text or a web's URL into this site http://babelfish.altavista.com/ and it will translate it for you.

 

Of course, a machine translation program can only go so far. "I got skunked on this one", "I started too late and blew it", and "This was a piece of cake" might not quite mean the same after going through the babelfish. Just remember to bring your towel. icon_smile.gif

 

Silver

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Guest Giorgio

Correct, there exists a homepage at www.geocaching.de since several months already. However only the first page and the general information pages are in German. All other links, including the cache pages, are directed to the English Original.

 

quote:
Originally posted by Artful Dodger:

Actually someone has created a German 'front end' already in German. I dont know the validity of this site. Here is the German Geocaching site.


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Guest Prime Suspect

quote:
Originally posted by Silver:

Of course, a machine translation program can only go so far. "I got skunked on this one", "I started too late and blew it", and "This was a piece of cake" might not quite mean the same after going through the babelfish.


 

Yeah, I've seen BabelFish translate "Texas" as "Roofing tiles". Go figure.

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