Sustaining & Escalations: Expanded Language Support for Learning Experience
TL;DR: We have expanded the number of languages available to learners in their course and program experiences from 5 fully supported languages to also include 9 partially supported (“beta”) languages (14 total)! Learners can select these beta languages from their account settings just as they do the fully supported languages.
Release date: April 19th +2 languages, April 26th +7 languages, 6 more to come soon
Product owner: @Marco Morales (Deactivated)
What is it?
Learners can now go to their account settings to see a longer list of languages. When they set a partially supported language they are shown a message letting them know the language is partially translated. Additionally there are buttons to quickly switch back to their previous language or head to Transifex to join the open community that helps us translate the platform if they would like to contribute. Included below are visuals of the language dropdown as well as an example message shown for partially supported languages.
Fully Supported Languages: English, Spanish, Arabic, French, Chinese (China),
Partially Supported Languages: Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Catalan, Hebrew, Indonesian, Polihs, Russian, Thai, Ukranian.
In the next week or two we also plan to enable the following languages, moving our language count from 14 total to 21!
Upcoming Fully Supported Languages: German, Turkish
Upcoming Partially Supported Languages: Georgian, Latvian, Swahili (Kenya), Basque (Spain, Japanese (Japan), Lithuanian (Lithuania)
Key talking points for customers:
What can I tell edx members with non-english content?
Once their languages are live on edX.org, we can let partners who create content in specific languages know that we partially (or fully) support their language now for the learning experience.
Why partially supported languages?
In the past we only enabled languages with at least 90% reviewed translations. By expanding this to include languages between ~45%-90% as partially supported languages
Who will notice the change, and where (LMS/Studio)?
It is important to note that this change impact the learning and authoring experiences, but not the complete edx.org marketing site. The marketing site remains in English / Spanish only.
What impact will it have on learners? On course teams?
Learners will now be able to set languages with many / most of the platform strings translated. In particular a few partners with courses not ini English or Spanish should benefit with this change.
Results: We are looking to see which languages learners set within the partially supported list to help prioritize language support / translation efforts. Additionally we are interested to see if this encourages more translation activities on Transifex from any edX.org learners.
Credits: Thanks to the Sustaining and Escalations team for working on this feature, as well as others who helped get this feature over the finish line!
@Waheed Ahmed (Deactivated), @Ned Batchelder (Deactivated) , @Feanil Patel , @Bill DeRusha (Deactivated) , @Seth McCann , @Farhanah Sheets (Deactivated) , Learner - Spartans Team