You may have noticed a few new options pop up on the site for languages, this is a new feature we are implementing to open up NPN to the world stage without creating specific categories which silo users that do not speak English.
Translators and Language Moderators Needed
Before getting to the features I have a request for our multilingual members. If you speak a language other than English and would like to help NPN with translating a small number of items we would grateful! Most items are translated automatically, but we need the category names and few other small items translated. Just reply here or send @David_Kingham a message to get started.
We are also looking for moderators that can monitor posts in a specific language. If you have any interest please contact @David_Kingham. You would ensure that posts fall within the guidelines and help any users that have questions who do not speak English.
New Features
- Language button -
Clicking on this button allows you to filter your posts by specific languages that you select. - Language tags - You will now see a small tag on each post:
this identifies the language the post was written in. The language tag is set when you create your post, you will now see a new box in the composer window for the topic language(s). Most of the time you do not need to manually set this yourself, it is automatically selected based upon your browserâs language settings. - Translation - Another new feature is text translation. When you see a post or reply that was created in a different language than your default language there will be an icon at the bottom of the post:
When you click on this the text will be translated using Google Translate and the translated text will be shown below the original text.
How to use
If you are English speaking you do not have to do anything and keep using the site as normal. As we get more people creating topics in different languages you may want to filter by the languages you speak. You can do this by clicking the language button and click âSet Content Languagesâ. This will open your interface preferences where you can set two options; âInterface Languageâ will change the language of the user interface (buttons, user menus, etc.), and âContent languagesâ will determine which posts will be displayed to you based upon the new language tag. For example, if you only want to see posts written in English you would put English in this setting and it would hide all posts written in other languages (currently it is not recommended to do this until the en tag is propagated to all past posts which will take some time). If you speak multiple languages you can set them all here to see posts in all the languages you speak.
Looking Forward
At the current time, this feature may seem unnecessary because NPN has always been English speaking only. By adding this feature now we are opening up the possibilities to see images from users across the globe that we may otherwise never see. In the short term, we will likely see no change, but as we begin to reach out to photographers in other countries this could quickly change. Exciting times are ahead of us!
Please let us know if you have any questions or problems with the new tools.