Of known visitors to ProtonDB, 62% use browsers that identify their preferred language as English. The USA, UK, Canada and Australia only account for 34% of all visitors. I find this remarkable for a site whose content is entirely in English, and rather complex English at that. How many are being left out of Linux gaming because it's too difficult to configure their games?

Today marks a big day: ProtonDB is now ready for localization! To kick it off, the site can now be used in German (of which 7% of visitors' browsers ask for and 10% source from Germany and Austria). I take my hat off towards @NoxPhasma for helping iron out the kinks by being our first language contributor.

To use the site in German, go to the Preferences section of your profile. Please note this feature is brand new so there may be gaps in translated content.

Um die Seite auf Deutsch zu nutzen, gehe zu den Einstellungen in deinem Profil.

How it helps

Up to now there's only been a smattering of user-generated content from languages other than English. With the new reporting system, authors must read and interpret much more. Once it's published, it's mixed with other English reports. That's often noise for English speakers, and it's even noisier for speakers of the author's language to have to dig through to find an answer to how to get their games to work.

As of a couple weeks ago, reports have structure. Authors may not ony write that they use a launch flag, have fullscreen problems, crashes, etc. but they may select these options from a set of choices. This aids with internationalization because the site can shepherd some of that knowledge even to visitors who don't speak the author's language by converting keywords of their selections to the visitor's language. As an example, here is a report authored in English while running ProtonDB in German:

We can even take this a step further: each of the yellow keywords can be linked to a localized knowledge base explaining things further.

But what happens when ProtonDB gets too noisy with reports in languages you don't understand? There are ways to mitigate this. One proposal I have is that report lists will have the ability to filter among:

• All
• My language only
• English only
• English and my language only

Can you help?

Let's not stop here! I welcome your help to expand our language coverage to the roughly 50% of ProtonDB visitors who live in countries where English or German are not official languages. There's very little technical expertise necessary: only the ability to edit JSON files. I've opened up a new proton-i18n repository with instructions.

Next week, I'll be continuing work on a new header for game pages that will take advantage of the new reporting structure to give you more accurate at-a-glance summaries of how games are doing, and I think you're going to like it!

Do you like where all of this is going? If so, I'd encourage you to support ongoing development by chipping in what you can at ProtonDB's Patreon page. Thank you very much if you already have!

Ein Prosit, ein Prosit der Gemütlichkeit!

--migelius (@buck)