Bird names in other languages (1 Viewer)

[Ignatius]

Looking something up in wikionary the other day gave me an idea: why not include a heading 'Translations' or 'Other Languages', where members from all over the world can enter the name of the relevant bird in their language? The mask for entering the information could have a language code dropdown like in wiktionary, so the entry as it appears on the page later would read something like:

German: Wacholderdrossel
French: Grive litorne

etc ...

Except for adding this functionality once, mods/editors would have very little truck with this because as stated above, the members would enter the actual local names. Depending on how the Opus site is built of course.

 

[delia todd]

Hi Ignatius

I vaguely remember the Editors discussing putting some, at least, foreign language bird names in the Alternative names which appear at the top of the article, but decided against.

I'm fairly sure that it isn't something they would be prepared to do themselves as there's so much work to do keeping the pages updated with all the changes happening, particularly in taxonomy.

However, what I could put to them would be the possibility of having an optional subheading on the page (maybe in the Taxonomy area?) for foreign names. The individual members would do this themselves. I'm not sure how this would work with the likes of Arabic or Chinese script etc though.

Also, I'm not sure we could put drop-down lists in. I had a look in the Help and it appears it may be possible but when I looked at the instructions I didn't understand a word, so it would obviously need someone who understands that sort of language (there seemed to be so many options and ifs, ands and buts, I gave up) LOL.

If the reason for asking this, is so that members can search the Opus for a bird in their own language, this could be done via Redirects, which would take them straight to the page? They are very easy to set up too.

Anyone reading this, you do know that full members can Edit Opus (not those in the New Member category)? However, if you don't have Edit buttons on an article when you look, please post in the Site Notice Board and ask Admin to amend your settings. This was a glitch which happened to some members on the change-over to the new platform in 2020... even I was affected LOL