WWW Virtual Library: LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONALISATION

The WWW Virtual Library has always been a project that has drawn together contributing scholars from around the World. Its basic language of communication has quite naturally been English. Its member libraries have though, for many years, been written in a variety of languages.

Since 2005 the basic navigation of the central Catalog of member libraries has begun the process of internationalisation.

If your web browser is set up to request non-English pages as your preferred choice, you may well now see the Catalog pages with the basic navigation instructions in the language of your preference.

(To see pages in a different language it may be necessary to adjust your browser language settings. These may be found under paths such as:
Edit/Preferences/Navigator/Languages, or
Tools/Internet Options/General/Languages.
It may well be necessary to hit the 'Refresh' option for each page to clear the cached copy as the site is revisited in the new language.)

No attempt is being made to translate the basic administrative pages of the Virtual Library (such as this page). The exercise is simply one to aid those of the many thousands of visitors who use the central Catalog each day, whose first language is not English. Member libraries do though have the option to submit translations for the title and description of their individual libraries. Where these latter exist, users will see these texts in their preferred language, as well as the basic page structure.

As of February 2005 pages are available in French and Chinese. Other languages are being worked on. We would particularly appreciate critiques and corrections from native speakers (the nuances of the names of academic disciplines cause enough debate in one language, and translating the wealth of subject categories we have will undoubtedly have not been perfect). Offers for other languages would also be welcome (our priorities start with the official languages of the United Nations and its agencies).

Contact: technical aspects of the central VL webpages.

There is also a listing of the page variants.