A few days ago, I wrote at work a script which collected information useful to the developers when troubleshooting a customer’s experience on one of our sites. This script checked things such as browser version, operating system, Java existence and version, Flash existence and version, Javascript support, and CSS support. All of this information is either sent via the HTTP request headers or is determinable through interaction with the customer, asking if they can see any No items which should show Yes if the item is installed, enabled, and working.
One item I decided to include for the hell of it was language, through the HTTP request Accept-Language header. Tired of seeing the standard en-us displayed every time I loaded it, I decided to add Esperanto to the fore of the header. I did this by adding it in Firefox’s language options chooser in the Content option panel.
Lo and behold, the language code eo appeared before en-us on my script and I was happy. It was the end of the day, though, so I shutdown shortly thereafter and went home.
The next day, I was startled when the two sites I almost always open first, Google and Meebo, displayed text to me in Esperanto! I had totally forgotten that I had altered my Accept-Language header.
I haven’t changed it back. “Why?” a perplexed reader may ask. I continue to use Esperanto as my main browser language for a few reasons.
- Immersion. When a site appears in Esperanto, I’m forced to translate. I don’t let myself change it unless I am in a rush. So far, I have not changed it.
- Internationalization. I fancy myself a proponent of software i18n and l10n, so it is educational to me to see how other sites have performed their i18n. I assume that most use either gettext or defines, wherein every string is set in a file with a series of global constants.
- Obscurity. It keeps people off of my computer
So, in there interests of determining the penetration of Esperanto as an internationalized and automatically-detected language for the web, I’ve compiled a list of sites which I often visit that have Esperanto strings shown when visiting with a browser which specifies that Esperanto is the preferred language.
- Google (just search, from what I’ve seen)
- Meebo (still missing a few strings, though)
- Twitter (largely untranslated, though)
Some sites surprisingly lacked Esperanto internalization, but it’s not a problem: Esperanto was never meant to be anyone’s first language!
- Yahoo!
- Flickr
- Zooomr
- YouTube
- MySpace
- Digg
- Twerq
- Wordpress
- Revver, Livejournal, Blogspot, and most others I visited
Some readers may be surprised that Wikipedia is omitted from these lists. Wikipedia does not internationalize its main page because all of the languages are listed as a links to the main page (cxefpagxo) of the language’s subdomain itself.
I’m neither surprised nor miffed that there number of sites that do have it are so few. As I stated previously, Esperanto isn’t meant to be anyone’s first language. It’s a quick, intermediary language. I assume that the aforementioned sites with Esperanto internationalization have someone one staff who speaks it fluently, and the translation process for it was effortless.
I hope to integrate i18n into a few projects I’m developing currently. By “hope”, I mean “will.”
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