It is not uncommon for me to be in the field with fellow naturalists who don’t share my native language. This often leads to lost-in-translation discussions. “Look a squirrels’ bread”, when seeing a Boletus edulis. In Dutch that is called “Eekhoorntjesbrood”. I now use iNaturalist to find proper tr…

This was added a few months ago .

What do you mean by the taxon description? Are you talking about the label on identifications or something else ?

I think Andra is referring to the common name label. Maybe the feature request should be framed: “Support multi-lingual common names”? Strongly supportive of this feature request to toggle or allowing the display on common names in more than one language (which I also asked Merlin to implement). Thi…

Currently, the language on my iNaturalist settings are set to English. A specific observation now renders as follows: [afbeelding] Sometimes the language is set to my native language, being Dutch, which renders the same observation as follows: [afbeelding] Switching between language - as I did…

For Dutch, you should be able to do it in 2 clicks at the bottom right of any page: [image] [image] (my settings display scientific names first)

Awesome, I wasn’t aware of the possibilty to have the scientific names first, this is really helpful. my feature request would be to have next to the scientific name, not one but more (multi-lingual) common names. A bit like the fabricated example below: [afbeelding]

I am aware and appreciate this, but going through all the clicks while out observing in the field is sub-optimal. Having a selected set of common names, next to the scientific name, would be really convenient here

Would it make sense to instead / also request that there be an additional “change language” button near the top of pages / in a more convenient spot?

Yea that make sense, however ideally the UI language should be seperated from the common names. Now changing the UI language is the only way to get to different common names.

They are separated, there is a setting that allows you to specify to show common names as used in a place. The problem is that for many names this is not entered, so while Gråand may be entered as a Danish name, it is not specified to be used in the place Denmark. The site wants to be able to suppo…

Display common names in multiple languages on taxon labels

Feature Requests

reuvenm January 13, 2020, 4:23pm 8

Also note that you can go to the page for the taxon, click on the “taxonomy” tab, and see a list of all the names in different languages:

Topic		Replies	Views
Select language for common names Feature Requests implemented	39	6923	October 31, 2023
Choose common names language and place in the app Feature Requests android-app , implemented , mobile-app	11	3650	August 13, 2025
iNaturalist language & common names General	12	1421	July 5, 2020
You can now choose up to three common name lexicons to view at once News and Updates web , android-app , ios-classic-app	41	3100	May 31, 2024
Show scientific names as principal and in first instance in projects (Species label) Feature Requests	8	959	July 15, 2020

Display common names in multiple languages on taxon labels

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