The vast majority of the articles on DEV are in English, but if you look at the latest posts occasionally you will see posts in other languages as well.
As DEV does not have any special way to indicate the language of the article, people used the regular tags instead.
This is slightly confusing as some articles are in that language and some are in English about that language.
A few of these language oriented tags I found:
- Arabic - 7 articles, mostly about Arabic and not in Arabic, Lack of RTL rendering does not help.
- Chinese - 11 articles
- Dutch - 19 articles
- Finnish - 4 articles 50% in Finnish
- French - 206 articles
- German - 41 articles
- Greek - 2 articles about Greek, one is partially in Greek
- Hebrew - only one article, RTL rendering does not work well
- Hindi - 10 articles, some in Hindi and some of those are in latin letters.
- Italian - 4 articles
- Japanese - 79 articles
- Korean - 37 articles
- Polish - 13 post
- Portuguese - 20 articles
- Romanian - 2 articles
- Spanish - 1204 articles
- Swedish - only one post and even that is about Swedish and not in Swedish
- Thai - 32 articles
- Turkish - 13 posts
- Vietnamese - 2 articles
- Ukrainian - 12 articles
Yes, I noticed that for some of the tags the indicated number of posts is not the same as the actual number of posts. I've already reported this issue
In the recent days, as I was checking the new posts more closely, I also saw quite a few non-English articles that did not have the language tag.
Surely, some people did not think adding the language tag or felt that they would like to use all 4 tags to indicate the subject of the article, just as every other article could have.
Improvements?
It might be better to have a clearer way to indicate the language, one that does not take away from the regular tags.
It might also benefit the readers if there was a clearer separation of articles in different languages.
It would be nice if DEV could indicate the language in the HTML tags as well.
It might be nice to support RTL - Right To Left for the benefit of Arabic, Hebrew, Persian
Separate marking or separate sites?
I can think of two ways to handle it:
A feature of Forem that would have a separate system of languages. This might be in the form of a new field in the Jekyll front matter or some language selector on the site. This probably requires development.
Alternatively the DEV team might want to launch separate instances of Forem for various languages. e.g. spanish.dev.to might be a good start as the Spanish tag already has more than 1200 posts. That does not require development, but might need extra maintenance work. It might provide the opportunity to translate the GUI of Forem to better serve other languages as well. Having RTL (Right to Left) support would be just the icing on the cake.
The third way is, of course, to leave everything as it is now.
Encourage adding language tags
In any case, until there is an official way to deal with languages it would be nice if all the people posting in languages other than English would add the language as a tag to their post.
This will help others discover the posts in any given language and it will give better indication to the DEV team as to which languages are most popular.
Latest comments (1)
That's actually a really good insight. Hopefully a solution can be found, it's really important to have an inclusive space here :)