International website now available in Portuguese

Read here about the why and how of making available telescope.org in Portuguese.



After the launch of the newly redesigned  international website about 6 months ago and in parallel with some advertising campaign on Google adds and YouTube, the team quickly realizing that the project was quite popular with audiences in Brasil and, generally speaking, in South America. (YouTube has buckles of stats available to play with ...)

With this in mind we as team have decided to embark in the task of translating the website into Portuguese. Me being, a Portuguese native speaker, was the obvious choice to translate it. My subject knowledge and experience in the academic and outreach roles were valuable, but also made me realize that many of the words really don't translate into Portuguese and are borrowed from the English. There is no equivalent, to the best of my knowledge, for 'dark frame' our 'full width half maximum', etc.

Now from a technical point of view, Chris devised a tool to search through code and wrap text to be translated, making my life much easier. Some bits of the website, especially when it comes to text embedded in flash, are a bit trickier and the team is working really hard to come up with an easy way to do it!

Now I have already been pocked by the guys to take upon the task to do the same in Spanish, but I'm not so sure how confident I am in my rusty Spanish (or more of a 'port-panish' dialect) to do it. Exciting and challenging, for sure, but we probably will need to outsource 'nuestros hermanos' in Tenerife.

The international Portuguese website is now live and there is always room form improvement, so just get in touch with the team if you want to contribute to it.