We’re featuring on the Czech Republic on the World Tour today.
Here’s the GADM Level 1 and Level 2 places we’re using. Thoughts on these places?
Are there issues with translation or local names?
What else can we do make iNaturalist better in the Czech Republic?
This is a more general comment than specific to the Czech Republic, but is relevant as we get into more and more nations that do not have site wide translations for their local languages.
A lot of translated names have been added by well meaning users who do not know that in cases where the site is not translated into that language that for it to have any impact, they need to also associate the name to be used in that place.
So for example, i switched over to using names for Czechia (PS the Czech Republic does not exist any longer - they changed their name to Czechia a few years ago, this should be changed on the site too), and looked at birds observed in the nation. A good half still show names in English, even though the name is entered in Czech, because the user did not know to make the 2nd link.
A while ago I made a request on here to run a job to at least clean up and create the associations for the ones that are already in the database. It would really help to get this done.
Firstly, the Czech Republic is the official name of the country after original Czechoslovakia (the Czechoslovak Republic) split into two countries: Czech Republic and Slovak Republic, shortly Slovakia. The Czech people don´t use the word Czechia (Česko in Czech) very often when they talk but you can see it sometimes in the written form. I know that for some time there were both “the Czech Republic” and “Czechia” as the places here on iNaturalist. I was rather confused and disappointed especially by the fact that the area of Czechia didn´t correspond with the territory of the Czech Republic - it included a small part of Germany too and the observations from there. However, now I wanted to check and the browser didn´t find it any more.
**And now to the original question. We have uploaded a lot of observations and when switched for the Czech language, we nearly always got the Czech names (as we are not qualified biologists, we can´t judge the correctness but with all the common species that we now know very well, it was perfectly ok). In fact a few times we uploaded an observation that had a Czech name but when switched into English, there was only Latin :-). **
We are absolutely satisfied with the functions that iNaturalist offers and very grateful that there is such a wonderful programme/ project/ application. We are a school team working on an Erasmus+ KA2 project called “Plugging into Nature with new Technologies” and we have found iNaturalist the most useful thing not only for the determinations but also as a kind of cloud where we can upload our observations, create projects and work with them.
What can be improved? It is something not doing with the language and something which is for logical reasons not possible we are afraid (very often the recording includes the singing of more than one species :-) ) . When we recorded the MP3 observations of birds´ singing, the application doesn´t suggest any determinations. Fortunately many iNaturalist usually helped and determined our observations within a few days.
Finally, we would like to thank a lot to all the iNaturalists who helped us working on our project mostly adding or checking the determinations. We love being a part of this great international team.
Unfortunately the Czech translation is sometimes incorrectly. We are already dealing with it in cooperation with Biolib.cz ;)
I did not realize the site had been translated into Czech, but the general point is still relevant for many other languages/nations.
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