Localization Notes
The earthquake map page is composed of text from several sources. Some of these sources are easily localizable and others are not.
- Local Text
- The text I've written myself is localizable. Make a copy of
the strings file,
translate each of the string variables into your
local language and then mail the file to
me.
- The Google Maps Application
- If you have set up your native language as your browser's default language,
Google Maps will detect this and deliver the user interface in your language
if they support it. If not, ask me, and I can probably localize that too if
you provide the translation.
- Maps
- Text in the maps themselves cannot be localized. Text such as city names
is part of the jpeg image and unfortunately cannot be changed.
- Info Windows
- The text in the info window about each earthquake comes from the US
Geological Survey RSS feed. At this point I don't have anything set up to
localize this, and it seems like it would be fairly hard to do so since there
are so many different locations. Let me know if you have any good ideas about
this.
- News Search
- This is another Google service which will serve up content in your
language if possible. To make this work I just need the right search term.
I've already set this up for a few languages with the help of a web translator.
- Ads
- Once the rest of the page is localized Google says they'll detect this
and serve ads in the correct language.
After your localized strings file has been installed, people using web browsers with that language set as the default will automatically see your translation instead of the original English page.
You can also view a translation by adding an 'hl' parameter set to a two letter language code, like this incomplete one for Spanish. <http://earthquakes.tafoni.net/?hl=es>.