Xeba73
02/03/14 12:39 PM
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Adding tags could be very helpful to draw more international visitors.
Example: Massimo Moratti's House
http://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/massimo-morattis-house/
Moratti is a very well-known personality in Italy, but most Italians wouldn't google "Massimo Moratti house" if they searched for his house. They would use words like "casa" or "villa". But if you use those words you won't find any VG links via Google.
I think it'd be very useful to make these maps available on Google in the respective language.
It doesn't need to appear as "...'s casa". It just needs to appear in some way. And I think that's what tags could be helpful for, no?
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nic
02/12/14 04:53 PM
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We've discussed similar things in the past. I like the idea of potentially allowing an article's title to be in multiple languages. Same thing with the description.
Of course the biggest challenge with allowing other languages is that I think most of the moderators only speak English. We would need a good team of non-English moderators to help ensure the translations are appropriate.
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Xeba73
02/14/14 06:48 PM
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Yeah but only if you're talking about whole articles/descriptions.
I'm really only talking about simple words, like:
Haus = German for house
Casa/Villa = Spanish & Italian & Portuguese for house/mansion
Hus = Danish & Swedish for house
etc.
There must be a simple way to find VG maps via Google when I use any of these words.
No need for non-English moderators.
Wouldn't this be kind of, you know, revolutionary for this site?
VG basically doesn't exist in South America, Portugal, Spain etc. (see Online Users map).
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nic
02/19/14 12:08 AM
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I would love for VGT to be more accessible to other countries and languages!
Your suggestion for auto-tagging haus, casa/vila, hus, etc is good but I'm not sure it would work in all circumstances. For example, we would have to tag existing maps as "house" maps, and then auto-replace any "House" in the title with "Haus", etc. But not all maps follow the format "XYZ's House", so this wouldn't be foolproof.
We could do the "quick and dirty" translation of anything ending in "House" with "Haus"/etc, but there are likely other keywords that should be translated too. The words "apartment" and "penthouse" are popular similar words, but might not always be appropriate to replace with "Haus". Other words such as "the" or "by" might also sometimes be appropriate to auto-translate, sometimes not.
I would honestly prefer to have human translations of maps (and the rest of the VGT interface for that matter). Do you think others in the community would want to help out with this task?
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Xeba73
02/21/14 04:11 PM
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Thanks for replying, nic!
I actually don't think that some sort of auto-replacing etc. is needed at all.
Just imagine the situation:
- somebody in Italy is searching for Massimo Moratti's house
- he's searching for "Massimo Moratti villa" via Google
- he finds a result for "Massimo Moratti's house"
Don't you think he'd understand what "house" means?
I already wrote that in my first post:
"It doesn't need to appear as "...'s casa". It just needs to appear in some way."
If you want to do it perfectly, yes, you'll need some sort of auto-replacing.
But if you only want Italians to click on the map you only need the villa/casa tags.
To be quite honest: I don't see the problem. Penthouse, apartment etc, come on, that's minor stuff. I'm talking about making thousands of maps available for millions of people who search for somebody's casa/villa/haus/hus/... and don't find any VG maps. None.
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nic
02/23/14 10:53 AM
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You definitely have a good idea. Let me think about it a bit. One of the problems is that I would have to change some parts of the site significantly so Google Search knew what URL to look for for other languages (eg it.virtualglobetrotting.com as an example).
Let me see how easy or hard that might be.
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