Since iNaturalist is an international project with a global user base, communication between users would be improved if it was more transparent which language users speak or prefer. Sometimes when leaving comments for misidentified organisms on other continents, it’s not clear what language I shoul…

There’s nothing stopping folks from including this information in their profile right now if interested. The language infoboxes on WP user pages are also optional. I’d personally be more interested in development time spent on a built-in translate feature for comments than standardizing a section f…

[image] bouteloua: There’s nothing stopping folks from including this information in their profile right now if interested. The language infoboxes on WP user pages are also optional. Yes, but if someone wrote “I am fluent in Korean and Russian”, on their profile page in Korean or Russian, I (…

[image] biosam: if someone wrote “I am fluent in Korean and Russian”, on their profile page in Korean or Russian, I (an English speaker lacking Korean and Russian comprehension) wouldn’t readily know that unless it was auto-translated to English. So, rather something like this on the right (o…

@ bouteloua Exactly! And maybe a star or bold text indicating one’s most preferred language to communicate. And maybe a simplified version could be displayed next to a username in Observations, or appear when the mouse is hovered over their username.

Preferred language plus other fluency could be useful. I do a ton of IDs throughout Central and South America. I generally comment in Spanish unless there’s reason to believe that the observer (or an identifier) speaks English (even then I often manually type in both languages - normally not really …

This feature seems really useful to implement, i’d also prefer to see it as something selected by a user during account creation then appearing on their profile (but can also be added or edited later). As per above, i focus on the fauna of a geographic region (Central and South America) far outside…

I work thru the Rest of Africa. Many languages. Some talk to me in French, and I reply in English. I am aware that many will be using English or French as their second language to communicate with iNat. We use translate for common / Western languages, but there are so many that are simply not offere…

One hint might be to look at the place name of the observation. Depending on the uploaders language the city or country name is different

If you are communicating with some one, you may can ask this person what language he knows? May like: Hey your species is cool, can i ask you some thing in an other language, what languages do you know?

Indicate a user's preferred language(s)

Feature Requests

bouteloua May 4, 2019, 7:07pm 4

I didn’t mean to derail by semi-proposing another feature request, so I split off comment translation into its own topic: Translation option for comments?

Topic		Replies	Views
Indicate the language of the app/website an observation was made with Feature Requests	5	686	September 24, 2021
Translation option for comments? General translation	8	1910	June 24, 2019
Boilerplate responses in other languages Feature Requests	2	797	July 10, 2019
What languages do you write comments in when identifying? General	43	1079	November 20, 2025
My mother tongue and English (indicating your preferred language in your user profile) General	30	1790	October 17, 2023

Indicate a user's preferred language(s)

Related topics