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What is a Language Selector(or Switcher)?
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Country/Language Selectors Matter: A Call to Build and Implement - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
Country/Language Selectors Matter: A Call to Build and Implement - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
Country/Language Selectors Matter: A Call to Build and Implement Common Translation and Country-Language Selector Repository Han-Teng Liao Oxford Internet Institute University of Oxford hanteng@gmail.com For Riga Summit 2015 What is a
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What is a Country Selector (or Switcher)?
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Why they matter?
First step
for users to select the preferred interface
A paradox of choice
More options could mean higher cognitive cost for
users to find the language they want
European Commission’s Information Providers Guide (IPG)
states that
“Language selection tool is mandatory…”
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Why they matter?
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…even within Chinese Wikipedia
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PhD Data Intensive Work comparing Chinese Wikipedia and Baidu Baike
All pages (2,500,000+) and all external links (2,000,000+)
inside both encyclopedias
270,000 web links parsed and analysed based on 3000 queries
- f search engine result pages across nine Chinese search
engine variants
60,000+ Sina Weibo and Twitter microblog posts Chinese and East Asian Internet Penetration Rates (historical
data)
Geographic distribution of power users in both encyclopedias
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What’s wrong?
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Inconsistent choice between names
Official names
"Korea, Republic of“ vs “Republic of Korea” “China, Republic of” vs “Republic of China” “Taiwan, Province of China”
Customary names
South Korea Taiwan Taiwan
What’s in a name? Country names are technical, cultural and political.
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Collations
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What are the possible solutions?
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Unicode Collation Charts:
http://www.unicode.org/charts/uca/
Unicode CLDR
Preferences on Customary names over
Official names
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Suggestions
Consistent collation in Web design Autocomplete based on both codes and names Complete world coverage for templates
EU official language and member state subsets Geographic categorization schemes
Separation of languages and states (flags)
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Source: http://flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/
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Source: http://flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/
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Implications
Best practices needed
for presenting a list of languages (and countries) for users to select their target language (and country)
Pooling resources Information literacies promoted
- n the use of language codes and country codes
- n the difference between customary vs. official
names
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Thank you
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PhD Data Intensive Work comparing Chinese Wikipedia and Baidu Baike
All pages (2,500,000+) and all external links (2,000,000+)
inside both encyclopedias
270,000 web links parsed and analysed based on 3000 queries
- f search engine result pages across nine Chinese search
engine variants
60,000+ Sina Weibo and Twitter microblog posts Chinese and East Asian Internet Penetration Rates (historical
data)
Geographic distribution of power users in both encyclopedias
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Percentage of visibility scores: encyclopedia sites among the top-10
C ategories
Baidu ¡ C N Y ahoo ¡ C N G oogle ¡ C N G oogle ¡ SG Y ahoo ¡ SG G oogle ¡ H K G oogle ¡ T W Y ahoo ¡ H K Y ahoo ¡ T W
The ¡C ambridge ¡ Encyclopedia ¡of ¡ C hina Top ¡10 ¡Search ¡ Terms ¡(Google ¡ and ¡Baidu) Best ¡ Film/Popular ¡ Music ¡(C hina, ¡ H ong ¡K ong, ¡ Taiwan) Modern ¡C oncepts ¡ (shared ¡with ¡
wikipedia.org baidu.com 0% 50% 100% 0% 50% 100% 0% 50% 100% 50% 100%