For the last few months, @naturalmedicine has been doing it's best to support dual language content on HIVE. It's hard to find a balance between allowing for diverse voices and creative freedom, and helping users write in the best way to help curators read and understand their content to reward their posts. In an ideal world we'd have so much HIVE POWER that we could afford to have lots of curators, voting often - but we don't. We have enough to go around and our curators support in all kinds of ways, but there's only so much we can do.

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From a curation perspective, our English curators simply can't read the Spanish content. It takes a lot of time to decipher a post, let alone checking it for plagiarism! There's particular things we appreciate, and that make us more likely to put a post forth for OCD support - good presentation, readable, clear photographs, original content. And good presentation has to be how easy we can read and understand bilingual content, right? That's a no brainer.

Oh, for a babel fish! A la Douglas Adam's 'Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy':

The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish..

It would make things easier, no?

I've been chatting to members of the Spanish community about various post presentations, formats and difficulties they might have creating content to suit both the English and Spanish speaking communities. Here's a few problems - and solutions - we've been discussing.

Problems with Text Flow

Take this post from @sabrip, for example. It's a lovely post on chocolate oatmeal cookies. Yum! The first paragraph is in English, and the second paragraph is in Spanish. That's fine - except - if I have to keep searching for the English, my eyes get tired and I lose concentration. I find it hard to keep my attention on the post.

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One way this can be solved is making the paragraphs or sections of text much, much longer. - like this post by @drrune. Even better, ensure that the text stands out by making one language bold.

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Another way, which I prefer, is columns, such as the following post by @gabrielaflores:

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Of course, this has it's problems too, as German speaker @muscara highlighted in Discord:

Two columns make short rows, which is more work for the reader. Longer lines are easier to read - that's why I stopped using the columns and started with the quotations. Especially because English text is always shorter than German text, that was awkward in columns. Now I put the English text in quotes, which has shorter lines, and the paragraphs are of more equal length. And: if you make columns with the "div class" code, you can't use links etc in the text. Using tables work, but these look strange depending on the frontend where you read it.

Whatever you choose to do, I suggest:

• Making longer sections of English text so curators aren't flipping back and forth in their heads to find the English
• Using bold font to make one language stand out over the other
• Using a good translator like DeepL
• Using a mixture of columns and longer paragraphs.

Columns look amazing for recipes - as does the table function, which looks like this:

Problems with Long and Clumsy Headings

Often dual language speakers write very long titles - one in English, and one in Spanish, in order to let their readers know it's a dual language post. As a curator, I want to get the idea of a post at a glance - do I even want to open and read it? A good title - and one that's not too long - and a blurry photograph will often stop me reading further. A title like this will drive me crazy (sorry, @leslieebano!):

One solution is to put the title in one language, followed by [ESP-ENG], and put the other language in the image. You can do this with any simple photo editing app on your phone. Look at this one by @pavanjr:

This can also be solved by changing the short description in PEAKD (you'll find this box at the end of your draft) to BILINGUAL CONTENT. Thanks @josecabrerav for this tip.

Using DeepL

One thing that @kittygirl told me about was the DeepL translator which you can install on your browser. All you need to do is highlight the text and click on the icon on the top right of your browser, once installed.

I think it's brilliant - because of this, I caught the gist of this beautiful poem by @sirpoe here. I'd love to see @asgarth and the team at Peakd implement an automatic translator into Peakd, but appreciate that would take a lot of work. @joseacabrerav suggested it might work like a flag icon - click on the flag of your language to read it, like a 'switch'. Now that would be an amazing babelfish! For now though, DeepL's translations are quite readable, and I often use it to speak to Spanish crew in Discord.

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With Love,

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