Technical specifications

This page collects technical specifications that are important when making and publishing translations. Many may deserve their own page or a more specific page later, but for now we curate such information sources here.

• There is a W3C specification for digital publications defining the creators, which includes translators. This could help us find translations and translators. When our translations switchboard shows available translations, it may be an idea to including information on who made the translation as an acknowledgement for their work. https://www.w3.org/TR/pub-manifest/
• Flags are not languages: problems and solutions.
• A free icon to denote languages.
• Post on where some panlingual fonts come from.
• LibreTranslate is an open translation app, not as good as Deepl, but FOSS. Their JSON API could be a model for ours.

javascript
const res = await fetch("https://libretranslate.com/translate", {
	method: "POST",
	body: JSON.stringify({
		q: "",
		source: "de",
		target: "en"
	}),
	headers: { "Content-Type": "application/json" }
});

console.log(await res.json());

• Do not do this at home, but some use DOIs with international endings. Might be something to test for, even if we do not know of a translation for a certain DOI or help us determine that languages of the original and translation. If in this example the part before the language code had been exactly the same we could have guessed the translation:
  • https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264069947-en
  • https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264069954-fr