Handling Multiple Languages in the Virtual Event Portal
Virtual events have inspired (and sometimes, required) event planners to be significantly more inclusive when it comes to their event attendees. From supporting different technologies and disabilities to formats and even languages. In this article, we're going to focus on languages. Making your event accessible to a global audience is critical to your success, and we're here to help!
Built-In Multi-Language Support for Static Text
Out of the box, PheedLoop's virtual event portal supports over 10 languages and allows your attendees to instantly view nearly all built-in phrases, buttons, labels, notifications, and more in their language of choice. These built-in bits of text are what we call "static text". To access this, attendees simply use the language selector at the top-right corner of your virtual event portal and they are able to select any language they may like. We're always working on adding new languages and making improvements to current translations, so please feel free to email us with requests or feedback.
Adding Custom Translations for Dynamic Text
Sometimes, you may want to go beyond the static text translations, and want to translate the whole event. This would include things like your session tiles, custom tags, etc. for example. Well, that's very possible, it will just take a bit of elbow grease. We cover in great depth how translating text works here. This allows you to very easily take any full phrase that exists in the PheedLoop virtual event portal, and create translations for it in one of several languages. Doing so will also translate those phrases fully into the selected language in the virtual event portal.
If a translation isn't inserted for a selected language, it will fall back to the default English text (or whatever you inserted in the original field itself, such as a session's title). This means if you don't want your content to be translated in every available language, which typically isn't needed anyway, you can always rely on your dynamic text to be available in your origin language and rely on PheedLoop to translate static text for you as usual.
Overriding Static Text Translations
This is just as powerful as dynamic text translations, perhaps more depending on your use-case! The reason you'd translate static text is if you find our built-in translations to be insufficient or inaccurate (perhaps your attendees prefer a certain variant of a language). In this case, you can override our built-in translations for any language and apply your own! For example, say you're looking at tweaking the way we translate the word "email" in French. The Candian French variant will be "courriel" but the France French variant will be "mél". You can override this word with your own custom translation to serve your attendee base best.
You would implement these translations in exactly the same way in the PheedLoop dashboard as any other translation.
Translating Partial Phrases or Large Blocks of Text
Keep in mind that PheedLoop's full translation feature set is based on translating full phrases, labels, buttons, etc. This means you cannot use the features to arbitrarily translate a subset of a phrase or sentence. You would need to implement the translation for the entire block of text.
Similarly, you may experience difficulty if you're trying to translate very large blocks of text. Not because this isn't supported, but because you may make a mistake in copying over the precise formatting or text encoding. This is only really a consideration for large blocks of dynamic text you may have inserted and are trying to translate (e.g. a speaker's bio). Ensure that you are taking into account (or simply avoiding inserting) any HTML content in those large blocks of text, matching spaces and line breaks, etc. Translating large blocks of text works best if you ensure you are inserting completely clean and unformatted text into the original text blocks.
Live Captioning, Interpretation, and Translation for Session Streams
