Content can come into your festival in any language: living, dead, historic, or constructed. If you have a fan fiction selection in a constructed language like Klingon or Sindarin, we can present that work (assuming Unicode support for the alphabet) just the same as we would a selection in French or in Chinese.

When we present a page for a selection, up to three different languages may show up on that page:

• The title in whatever language the selection is “marketed in”
• The synopsis in the selection's “content language”
• The title, synopsis, and all other content in whatever your supported language is for the user

When you setup your SparqFest site, you configure the “supported languages” for the web site. The supported languages are the languages into which the core SparqFest content has been translated. You may select from:

• Basque
• English
• French
• German
• Italian
• Spanish

Users may select from any of the supported languages you configure as their “preferred” language.

Examples

To better understand how the dynamics of language and translation work in SparqFest, it's helpful to go through a few examples. For the purposes of these examples, we will assume a festival that is configured for English and Spanish (with English as the default language)

A Common Language

The simplest presentation of a selection for this sample festival is when the selection is an English-language selection and the visitor speaks English as their first language. The title and synopsis appear a single time on the selection page, and everything is in English. Similarly, if the content were in Spanish and the user language were Spanish in this example, the entire page would appear in Spanish.

A User with a Different Language

A more complex example is the French speaker coming to the page of an English-language selection. As with the common language example, all content will be presented in English because English is the primary language and no other site language matches the French speaker. An additional element is that we do not have a “fallback” language for French.

Some languages like Basque have “fallbacks”. If the visitor is a native Basque speaker in this example instead of French, the site would actually appear as if the speaker with Spanish. This behavior results from the fact that Spanish is configured as a fallback for Basque. Consequently, the actually appearance of the page for a Basque speaker more reflects that of the next example.

A Supported Language, but Different from the Content

That brings us to the Spanish speaker viewing the page of an English-language selection on our English+Spanish SparqFest site. How we handle titles here begins to get a little idiosyncratic.

First, we maintain translations for the title, logline, and synopsis for every selection in all supported languages plus the content language. However, while translating a logline and synopsis always makes sense, sometimes titles are not translated. Consider, for example, the web series Utopia Planitia. It is an English language series, but the title is actually Latin. In SparqFest, we therefore maintain the Latin title for all languages. Control over how the work is titled in each language lies in the control of each filmmaker.

Assuming an English-language title in which the title should be translated, the Spanish speaker will see:

• The Spanish and English titles for the selection
• The Spanish and English synopses for the selection
• Everything else in Spanish

If, on the other hand, the selection has one title for all languages, the Spanish speaker will see that one title (without seeing the title duplicated twice).

Content in Unsupported Languages

Next, let's consider a selection in Russian for an English-speaker. This user will see:

• The Russian and English titles for the selection
• The Russian and English synopses for the selection
• Everything else in English

If the user language, however, is Russian, that user will see:

• The Russian title for the selection
• The Russian synopsis for the selection
• Everything else in English

As long as the underlying alphabet has Unicode support (you can test this inside SparqFest), content for a selection in any language that ever existed as well as made up ones can be displayed).

Content Translation

You might be wondering, “Why wouldn't I just select all of the languages you support?” 

The answer is that each language you add increases the complexity of managing your content. Selecting “supported languages” is a trade-off between making the largest number of possible visitors happy in their native language and the complexity of entering the data.

We ease this burden by supporting automated machine translations and the ability for you to customize any translations you do not like. When a creator enters the meta-data for their project, they enter that data in the language associated with their project (yes, a Klingon language film should enter their synopsis in Klingon!). We will then, if possible, perform a machine translation from that language into all supported languages.

Nevertheless, machine translation is imperfect. There should be someone capable of reviewing translations in all of the languages you support. As a rule, the machine translation is “good enough” for user-generated content like selection meta-data, but it's not good enough for general site content. For this reason, we do machine translation of user-generated content, but all SparqFest site content is stored in human-managed dictionaries.

The bottom line: the more languages, the more review work someone needs to be doing.

Localizing Important Data

Our support for a localized experience goes beyond translations. We also display important types of data in the preferred format for each user. In addition, we display the times for online events in the end-user's local timezone (times for in-person events are always show in the venue time zone).

Some culturally-specific imagery is also localized. Where we use currency symbols as icons, for example, the end user will a symbol for whatever currency is local to them (actual prices, however, are always shown in the festival currency).