As many of you may have noticed, I’m running a great new plugin for WordPress in the footer of my website these days. It’s called Global Translator from Davide Pozza and it is responsible for generating about 2,000 pages of content for thisismyurl.com automatically. It’s the same plugin being run by top websites such as weblog tools collections, which is most likely where I came across it but I find the plugin had a major issue that I had to address.

thisismyurl.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/pluginscreenshot.jpg" alt="pluginscreenshot" width="303" height="94" / rel="lightbox[roadtrip]">By default, the plugin displays a series of flags to represent to languages. This has always ticked me off a little, since I never know which flag to click. For example, I’m Canadian, so if I want to read a blog I have a choice between reading it in English or French, so where’s my Canadian flag eh? Perhaps I’m meant to click the France flag but I’m not French, I’m a Canuck so … you can see my dilemma.

The Global Translator offers support for 34 languages including Italian, Korean, Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Portuguese, English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Greek, Dutch, Bulgarian, Czech, Croatian, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Norwegian, Catalan, Filipino, Hebrew, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese but the developer fell into an age old usability issue and elected to represent those languages as politic flags, easy to understand but technically inaccurate.

Does it really matter? Well no, of course not. As a Canadian, I’m just as happy to click on the US flag to read English as I would be to click on the Union Jack or the Kiwi flag, it doesn’t really matter to me, but what about to the average Senegalian? Hundreds of years of political oppression and slave trading at the hands of mother France … sure they still speak French but they’re not French so, what’s the solution?

Well, I’m glad I asked.

Editing the plugin is fairly straight forward, just click the Editor option in WordPress (please make sure the plugin isn’t activated before you do this, otherwise it could end very badly) and select Global Translator from the list to your right.

Sifting though the code, locate the following line:

<li><a id=’flag_$key’ href=’$flg_url’ hreflang=’$key’ $lnk_attr><img … ></a></li>

and change it to:

<li><a id=’flag_$key’ href=’$flg_url’ hreflang=’$key’ $lnk_attr>$value</a></li>

this edit will remove the graphic icon (the flag) and replace the image with the language name. Hopefully, in the future the plugin will allow us to do this automatically.