Abstract

This poster will demonstrate the newest updates to the Translations interface for Zooniverse.org. Zooniverse is the world’s largest platform for crowdsourced research, with more than 2.6 million registered volunteers and over 300 projects launched to date. Because the Zooniverse team is made up of developers and researchers who speak English as their first or primary language, the Zooniverse community at large is primarily English-speaking.

Since 2013, there has been an ongoing effort to create platform infrastructure to allow projects to be translated into non-English languages, either by team members or volunteer translators. This poster will present the current technical infrastructure for Zooniverse Translations, the technical challenges that drove the implementation decisions made by our team, and the current limitations of the Translations feature. 

While a translatable infrastructure opens up possibilities for including non-English speakers as part of the broader community, we are aware that barriers remain in place that prevent Zooniverse from being a truly multilingual resource, including the requirement that projects have an English language version in order to apply for beta review, the How-To documentation for the platform being only available in English, and a lack of dedicated resources for working on the Translations feature.

It is our hope that this poster presentation will help us solicit important critical feedback that we can use to increase the usefulness of this resource, as well as to help move the platform towards a more equitable future.