Widget, I18N and the power of community

A week ago we released the I18N (stands for Internationalization) version of the rating widget, and the feedback from the community is great.
Actually, the feedback should be for them since they are great part of it.
Making something Multilingual in the blogosphere is not a simple task if you want to do it the traditional way. It is not a site that you have to translate to specific international market where you already have  representatives on your payroll that can translate or review the local site language.
Here the mission is far more complex, and I thought I'll share our approach with you.

So... First we released the rating widget with English wording only(5 weeks ago). The blogosphere got it very well but we saw international blogs that are leaving just because of the language.
So the need for internationalizing it was clear.
Then, we hired Or which his last project was converting Wordpress MU to Hebrew, to assist us in this project (that's another nice recruiting story).
The idea was, to engage bloggers to assist us in translating the rating widget for their own benefit and some credits in our system.
It took Or 2 days to come up with a widget translated to Hebrew and can be dynamically changing languages according to pre-configuration.
Then there was the question how we get this thing translated.
We opened a PBWiki site where bloggers can edit their language translation.

 
The next step was to develop a simple script that converted the wiki page HTML to a very simple JavaScript file. You can see an example of the French outcome here  .
Or then also developed a very simple script that contain data about the name of the supported language, the URL of the translation Javascript file and most important... links and credits to the bloggers that translated the widget.
So, during the widget installation this data is loaded and presented to the user:

Now all we had to do is to engage the bloggers to assist in translations.
The link link of  "Can't find your language here?" is linked to a page that explain the translation contribution process. with our support email. And guess what... we've got many emails from bloggers that are willing to contribute about 10 minutes from their time to translate or review the widget wording for their  language.

We already released:
German
French
Polish
Spanish
Hebrew

UPDATE: Catalan, Hindi, Italian, Russian, and Ukrainian are also released.

Waiting for bloggers review are:
Catalan, Russian, Ukrainian, Italian, Chinese, Malayalam, Parsian, Hindi and I guess it wont take long till we will have more.

One more cool thing is the fact that the language file is an open Javascript file linked from the widget installation code.  So... if you want to change the wording of your widget language and you are techish enough. No Problem, download the file, change the wording and save it in a place which is accessible to the net (like your blog server). That way, for example,  I can change the rating scale to something that is more "SeeBreeseAndBiz style":
Bad                 --> Dead calm
Boring           --> Clam
OK                  --> Nice breeze
Good             --> Cool surf
Excellent    --> A hell of a storm