Project Linguine
Warning
Project Linguine is an initiative to define a deterministic list (the Linguine Recipe) to cover all linguistic Sprachraum. As in,
How many people around the world do not speak any of the languages defined in Linguine?
... should be near zero.
Candidates are...
- BCP 47
- Ethnologue 200
- DeepL
- Google Translate
Ethnologue 200 is too much to support. And with BCP 47, translating en-US, en-CA, and en-GB separately is unfair and excessive. So we agree that a linguistic Sprachraum should be simplified, yet considering variants like Taiwanese (zh-TW is different from zh-CN).
Do we still need to support i18n? It's a bunch of extra cost, not going to lie. But tech is in an exceptional stage right now. People from everywhere fly to Silicon Valley for a better life and look for information worldwide, so backfilling the data would be relatively easy. It's laying out fisher rods worldwide, for just that extra cost.
Looking at the hn.cho.sh subscriber lists, I did find bogus subscriber lists. I have no real Finnish subscribers, for example. Still, I want to keep the window open for international free minds to find the service. I got this email from an Italian subscriber.
I found the service thanks to the advertisement in your extension of Bing Chat for All Browsers. This service is very innovative, and I especially love the fact that it is in my language. I will certainly share this news with my friends who are tech enthusiasts. The first time I visited the site, I had the amazing feeling of being catapulted into the kind of future I've always dreamed of but never seen realized. Thank you for providing such a fantastic experience! Make the web truly innovative!
The most important thing is to keep a net service profit, or net neutral at least. At this burn rate we can't keep it running.
DeepL vs Google Translate vs Bing Translate Offering Comparison
So here's the plan.
- Use this list.
- For Curated Newsletters, you cannot sign up for more than three locales. This is to prevent bogus subscribers.
- As such, we will have zero subscribers for Finnish, for example, because we have yet to have an actual customer. We'll still translate the top 3 articles, for ads and for the 'magical landing experience.'
- There can be a button to request translation. Maybe this can be a pro feature?
While comparing offerings, I found that nb and no are both used in the Norwegian Langauge. Interesting.