Knol in Different Languages

You can help us launch Knol in your language using the Google in Your Language console. Simply go to http://www.google.com/transconsole, declare the languages you are fluent in and choose Knol as the project to contribute to (of course you can also contribute to other Google projects :)).

To add/change languages, you click on 'My Account' at the top, which takes you to https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageAccount. There you will see Google in Your Language listed under My Products. Click on the 'Edit' link next to it to add/change languages you are fluent in.

 

Also, if you see a Knol Help page which is not translated into your language, you are welcome to translate it. If the result looks good, we may use it as an "official" help knol. 

 

Some knol Authors are developing a Knol Translation Marketplace, where people can help other's get their material translated. This is a user-initiated effort, not officially Google sponsored. But you should find some friendly and helpful assistence there.

We do have some translation capabilities, here: http://translate.google.com, including the ability to translate web pages. But given the present state of technology, the quality of a machine translated page is generally poor.

I am writing Knols in my language (e.g. Spanish), but they appear in the English What's New list, not in my language's What's New list.

When first you create a knol, it will appear in the What's New list based on your interface language, not based on the knol's content language. We will work on speeding up automatic content-based language detection. But, in the mean time, you can:

1. change your interface language to the language you are going to be writing in, or
   
   
2. create separate accounts, one for each language you use.
   
   This is what we are doing for various "Knol Help" accounts. An added benefit of having per-language accounts is that you can write your Profile separately for each language of your readers. The "My Knols" list of each persona will contains knols in only one language.
   

Do you have any support for Hindi or other Indic languages?

The knol interface is not yet available in Hindi or other Indic languages, but we do have a transliteration control. If you are accessing Knol from within India, we will add this control to the tool bar in edit mode:

Click on the image to expand.

Select the language you want to use from the menu, and start typing phonetically. As you type words using the Roman character set, we will transliterate them into the selected script.

The languages we currently provide transliteration support for, are: Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil, Telegu, and Urdu.

Once you are finished writing in your native language, press on the button to turn off transliteration and toggle back to writing in English.

If you are not accessing Knol from within India, you can turn it on just by going to Preferences and checking the box Enable transliteration for typing in Indic languages, and pressing Save.

Do you have any support for right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew?

Yes. If your language is set to Arabic or Hebrew, we will include a control within the text editor that allows you to switch the directionality of text on a per-paragraph basis. If the control does not appear for you, you can turn it on by going to Preferences, checking the box Enable right-to-left editing support, and pressing Save.

I am writing using a particular font, but visitors are seeing "boxes" instead of my characters.

Web browsers can only display characters from fonts that are properly installed. The knol site does not install fonts for you, and the actual procedure used to install fonts may vary by browser and operating system.  Search on Google.com for [install fonts] plus the name of your browser or operating system, and you may find useful resources. (Use caution and only install software from trustworthy suppliers.)