Short version: Do French-language websites use social tagging to mark content and make searching easier, like English websites do? Do they use social tagging at all, perhaps in some other way?
Long version: I’m one of the few people in charge of a knowledge base (a collection of articles for our software products). We’re starting to add translations of some articles, at the same time that we’re adding social tags to our articles. Just like the tagging on sites like Delicious and Flickr, our social tags are designed to indicate what kind of content the articles have, like “cannot-start-product” or “how-to-<do-x>” or “<product-feature>-best-practices”. We’re trying to decide whether we should leave the English social tags in place when we translate the articles, or translate the social tags at the same time, or simply omit the social tags.
I’m the only person on the core team who speaks French [the translators are a separate group], so I’ve been assigned to investigate how tags are used in French. … Except that that’s an incredibly vague question, and I really have no idea where to begin.
So, I thought I’d seek the wisdom of the Teeming Millions, and the dopers I know to be francophone (matt_mcl, Mnemnosyne, constanze, surely some I’m forgetting…). Any thoughts? Have you noticed social tagging being used on any French sites?
Are those tags visible to and usable by the users? Are they something the page’s search feature uses? Do they duplicate index/menu information? Are there indices/menus or are the tags and the search feature the only way to locate the desired article?
There’s an option you don’t mention: have the social tags in both languages. This may make maintenance easier even if it looks like more work at first sight (you can search the database for the EN version of the tag to make sure that every instance of it has been updated in every language, when an update is necessary).
Also, I realize your translators should know this, but the double-language may make it easier for the users to search, too. Many sites in languages other than English have their FAQs listed under a heading along the lines of “[Frequent Questions spelled out in the site’s language] (FAQs)”, because the acronym has jumped across language barriers even though most readers wouldn’t be able to tell you what’s the English it stands for or even what language it’s from.
I’m not sure I quite understand what you’re looking for, but if you mean things like the “Explore Flikr through tags” list or YouTube subject lists of clickable words, then yes, I have seen it in French before used the same way as in English - to highlight words/topics that can be crosslinked to other items that may be related.
I would definitely translate the tags into French, but I agree with the idea of having the tag area list them in both languages. French Canadians are exposed to a lot of internet/technology terms in English, so they might be likely to conduct a search on an English word and try and find articles in French ( like I did just now to try and understand your question - ““social tagging” français”). Having both linked to each other makes it a lot easier to find the content in a language they can more easily understand, but also linked to the English one for reference.
FWIW, the more common “FAQ” translation I’ve come across in Québec is the backronym “foire aux questions”.
Thank you, Nava and mnemosyne both, for your responses! Yes, you both captured what I meant, and my apologies for not being clearer.
To address some of the questions: the tags are currently visible by the users and can be searched for. Tags aren’t user-editable yet, although that will probably come later. There are categories that filter search results, but one must use the search feature (searching for content words or tags) to find content. [We can debate whether this is good or bad, with over 100,000 articles, but it’s a limitation of the software we can’t get around.] There is no index.
After reading your replies a few times, I’ve forgotten if we considered the double-language approach – I don’t think we did, but it’s brilliant. (We’re already doing that with language tags, in fact, so that the French articles get tagged with “french français francais”, for all the reasons you mentioned. But we could of course extend that…)
That’s interesting about how FAQ has been reinterpreted! I need to spend more time on Québec websites…