Wowhead says Bonjour, Hola, and Guten Tag
by Eliah Hecht 
May 23rd 2008 at 5:00PM
The good people at Wowhead, WoW database extraordinaire, have just warned me that the French, the Spanish, and the Germans are invading! OK, not really. Actually, the site is set to go live with localizations in those three languages, which will appear in the next 24 hours. You will then be able to read descriptions of quests, spells, and items, and everything else on that marvelous site, in any of those languages (plus of course English). Each language will have its own comment thread on each page, although the forums will remain English-only. I imagine this will come as welcome news to the many WoW players out there who do not have English as a first language; even on the North American realms, there seem to be a fair amount of French speakers. Hooray for multilingualism!
Filed under: News items
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Sorano May 23rd 2008 5:45PM
« even on the North American realms, there seem to be a fair amount of French speakers. Hooray for multilingualism! »
Voilà un commentaire très vrai! : )
(There lies a true statement, or QFT)
Too bad a lot of people throw a fit whenever I speak my native language in the trade chat.
alrdye May 23rd 2008 7:07PM
We Americans like to make fun of the French for stereotypical reasons. Pay no attention to us. We are just loud mouthed, fat bastards anyhow. ;)
Tim May 23rd 2008 5:58PM
Excellent! Very good on their part as far as keeping their audience connected and including their international supporters.
I know from a professional development standpoint that tasks like this are painstaking and tedious - it'll be greatly appreciated!
hausr May 23rd 2008 6:11PM
Wowhead is already my main site for items/quests info and I have no problem with english :)
Even if I'll keep reading the english version, as French I'm happy that Wowhead implemented this feature :)
I guess it will also help them to have a larger user base :D
Merci Wowhead !!
haha May 23rd 2008 7:08PM
what a coincidence 3 days after wowdb rolls the localization feature out, wowhead is in again.
and what a surprise, wowinsiderfanboys report on wowhead, but ignore anything curse related.
how about the worldofraids revamp? missed that too? :D
Eliah Hecht May 23rd 2008 7:10PM
I actually did miss the WoR revamp. I read their RSS feed every day, but I don't click through to the site that often. It does look great though.
As for WOWDB, I never use the site, and they don't seem to have a feed for recent updates, so how would I tell if something changed there? Besides, they've only got two languages. Wowhead has four. ;)
TecnoBrat May 26th 2008 6:13PM
Localization takes weeks or months of work, you really think wowhead rolled out a complete localization of the site in 3 days? You have to be joking.
First the whole site had to be recoded to accept localized variables, and then all of the language had to be translated. Its a lot more work than can ever be accomplished in 3 days.
The fact that wowdb has only 2 languages leads me to believe they heard what wowhead was up to, and scrambled to not look like they are way behind on features. Just my opinion though.
haha May 23rd 2008 7:14PM
ye, they miss the feed, but they have a frontpage: http://i28.tinypic.com/10xt5s6.png
Eliah Hecht May 23rd 2008 7:15PM
Yeah, I see that *now*, but like I said, I never go there. I can't go around all day checking web sites that don't have feeds and rarely update. It would be too time-consuming.
Anyway, good for them being in French as well now. I'm sure the French-speaking people of WoW will appreciate it.
fran May 23rd 2008 7:41PM
yay, as an spanish native speaker, I'm glad wowhead embrace all of us...though for some reason, i don't like when games that are created in english are translated to spanish...it makes me laugh to read "Rasganorte" instead of "Northrend" xD
Elroir May 24th 2008 4:03AM
I'm very happy about this, because until now I had to look on a german DB get the english item name and then have a look at wowhead. The only thing that sucks is that I have to read the german comments -.-
Thander May 24th 2008 2:12PM
If they do it like most websites, you can enter the German name. When that page loads, you can change the site to English on that page. This way, you can read the English comments with a German name search.
But who knows? The new languages might get a lot of support and you won't need the English comments.
Verses May 24th 2008 7:05PM
"even on the North American realms, there seem to be a fair amount of French speakers. Hooray for multilingualism! "
I Myself am a French-Canadian (Québecois) and they don't offer the option to play with a French client on the US realms, so it's still nice though to laugh at the cheezy names they gave to the cities and multiple items :P