As many of you know, LibraryThing is available in more than a dozen languages like German (LibraryThing.de), French (LibraryThing.fr), Dutch (LibraryThing.nl), Finnish (fi.LibraryThing.com), Polish (pl.LibraryThing.com) and Slovak (sk.LibraryThing.com).

Basics: Today I introduced a new feature, called “tag translation,” to show many of LibraryThing’s 87 million tags in the language of the site. Translation has been seeded with translations drawn from one user-driven ecosystem, Wikipedia. LibraryThing users can help out by adding new translations, and voting on existing ones. Although words are rarely perfectly equivalent between languages, translation may prove useful to many of LibraryThing’s non-English members and, in time, to libraries that use LibraryThing’s data feeds and LibraryThing for Libraries.

The feature: Tags show up translated wherever tags appear(1). You can choose to see them that way, with color-coding (pink for translated) or you can opt to shut the feature off. Here’s a a version of Thucydides with current German-language tag translations.

The same can also be seen on tag pages, for example on this French page for “love.”

Tag translations can be examined, voted upon and edited at the bottom of tag pages. Here’s the expanded view of some of the tags for “Love.” This is the only part of tag translation that is seen on the English site LibraryThing.com.

To turn off or to color the tag translations, use the little info button at the bottom of tag clouds (wording will vary according to language.) It pops up a little area to make the change.

Review translations: You can review recent translations, and vote on them here: http://www.librarything.com/helpers_tagtranslations.php.

More information. For more information about how tag translation works and to comment come join us on Talk.

Labels: new feature, new features, tagging