An European story: Providing internationals with real time information
How the lack of localization and discoverability leads to a public safety issue and what can we do about it.
The use case
Have you ever wonder how would you feel if you find images of an urban fire at walking distance of your home while you stay abroad ?
That’s what happened to me this weekend, the fire you see on this image started in Lisbon, capital of Portugal.
Employment market in the EU is rough and it’s very common to move to a new country by need or to seasonally work in a foreign country.
I was born in Belgium but got to move to Bulgaria for work, then Austria for love and finally in Portugal where my US fiancee had to go under work visa in order to stay in Europe with me.
Life literally decided for us according to Schengen agreement and lack of standardization of the migration policies in the EU 🙃
I will highlight some of Portugal issues in this article but don’t get me wrong, I am grateful this country gave me the opportunity to lawfully live somewhere with her and as long as we live here, I will do my best to contribute to its development.
My first reaction as I found this picture in an instagram story was to try a fact checking before I worry for my friends and the city, quickly searched for “Fire Alcantara Lisbon” referring to the location of the ongoing fire.
The only information I found was about previous forest fires in Portugal.
So is this fake news or… ?
I tried my best Portugnol and found advertises about electrical oven or mexican restaurants.
One thing is sure is you don’t just get proficient in a language by listening to people for 2 years if you never found the time to actually learn it.
So I opted for a bit of technological help and after 3 different inputs on Google translate, I was able to find a search input in Portuguese that confirmed the information.
Real time information
Overall this took me 20 minutes before I realized there was an actual fire and I could safely inform other migrants living in Lisbon, and indeed, none of them was aware of the ongoing fire.
Now I don’t mean to say these people were facing an immediate threat as I am sure the firemen established a security perimeter. For such events, two things are important: Isolate the threat (fire) and ensure access to the competent people to the area where they are needed, which also ensure their own safety during the incident.
Providing real time information to each citizen helps to protect them and prevent them from encroaching the access.
For a more individualistic concern, this helps people to adapt their day (and avoid snowball effects harming the mobility of the whole city) and get accurate information about their safety and the one of their relatives.
To not get this information causes a practical — but most importantly — a moral harm.
This is normal civic and security infrastructure that any government should provide trough the public service, in this case, they provide this information trough partially open data and it is made accessible to Portuguese speakers by fogos.pt, a charitable contribution by Tomahock.
The web app indexes each incidents on search engines so their are discoverable using the name of a location, when you click it, you can see the approximative location of the fire on a map and get up to date information about the resolution of the incident.
A screenshot showing how the information appears on search engines
The web app is really well made and proves the impact an individual can have by extending the public infrastructure (open data) to provide the service specifically needed for such situations.
Internationalizing fogos.pt
As we seen, the service is hardly accessible to an international audience, we also seen this can cause issues not only for migrants, tourists and business or non profit travelers, but also the natives.
So we can cut trough wether or not it is the responsibility of a Schengen country’s government to prevent systemic discrimination of its foreign residents and I assume that providing and internationalizing such a service on public money would be a rational path.
A piece of globalization knowledge for readers not aware of European affairs: Schengen citizen are free to move and work in any Schengen countries wether they speak the official language or not and also have the right no to be discriminated based on their nationality or language, that’s in theory, but some detractors have highlighted concerns on the impact this can have on a country’s identity and sovereignty, as well as it’s organizational capacity to provide fair treatment to Schengen migrants in the 24 national languages spoken in the EU. This opinion is supported by people from very different backgrounds, stereotypically ranging from far right nationalists, to extra local left, both arguing they fear for small businesses and loss of cultural legacy to a monocultural globalized society.
This is of course not the outcome of internationalization and globalization practices or economical agreements like Schengen, but this narrative as a strong practical impact on local policies and is something to always consider when addressing Schengen related issues and the reason why the EU is struggling so much to reach an agreement on its migration policies.
https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-history/languages_en
In order to internationalize fogos.pt, we will need to focus on two different aspects of internationalization,
- First, the internationalization of the web app’s content and third parties (eg: ongoing fire datasets, OSM tiles and meteo information) in order to support the delivery of a fully localized app and support the work of translators on localization files or tools.
- Second, to make sure it is discoverable to the audience it is meant for, in real time, in different languages, by extending the capacities of the current search engine optimization (SEO) solution or trough other channels such as social networks, local communities or language specific medias.
I reached out to the creator of the service to propose my help on the matter as I would be very happy to provide it and will directly benefit from it in the future.
I18n and the future of internationalization
The usual approach to internationalizing a web application is to set up a i18n compatible system which enable to deliver translated content.
This is easily done by installing a library, replacing static texts by translation functions and adding content keys so that the system can read a translation file or request translated content from a remote endpoint.
If you look at the previous screenshots from fogos.pt, you see we also have to add some formatting support, which we can do with most recent implementations of I18n or other specific libraries.
- Text direction
- Plurals
- Units conversion
- Dates and durations conversions
It’s also a good practice to specify the coordinates system used when sharing raw GPS coordinates, but it doesn’t seem useful as the people don’t really need to copy these coordinates in another app. It is safe to assume it uses leaflet’s default Pseudo-Mercator projection if we ever need to convert this in the future to support a specific interface for a specific audience (eg for Asian market where is is common to use Kakao, Naver or Alibaba instead of those more popular to westerners like Google map.)
As soon as this system operates well with at least two language, it becomes very easy to add more languages in the future and open to contributions using continuous localization tools or by simply exchanging localization files (though the later might lack a bit of the context needed by the translators to provide accurate translations and make it hard to properly credit contributors)
This would enable such a system to self operate, as long as the software architecture is respected and the third parties support internationalization as well.
Discoverability and multichannel planning
Now we need to make sure we didn’t spend time on something useless. It is common to find localized governments digital assets (web page, regulation, form,…) that don’t seem to be much used because no one actually has any idea it’s there in the first place.
This might lead to wrongfully interpreted data that seems to say people the service was built for actually don’t need it when they still need it but the strategy was lacking accessibility awareness.
To address this issue, an organization needs to understand not only who needs to access these assets but where and how it delivers it. You can grossly apply these strategies wether you work for public or private sector.
The current strategy for fogos.pt is to deliver information trough two channels:
- Direct access to the web app’s url — Aimed for previous users or over social recommendation
- Trough a search engine request — Leveraging SEO capacities
For the first one, we might want to share the url of the website with migrant communities, relocation and global mobility agencies, tourism blogs and influencers, hotels and other places where non Portuguese speakers would organically would need the information, taking different profiles into account.
This is the less technical approach but one that just works as it is, though it will require long term commitment to sustain the service’s visibility.
The later approach might actually be easier and that’s the one I used in Portuguese as a user, we can internationalize the SEO by adapting the web app’s meta tags ( they define the text, images and links you see in the search results or when the link is shared on social networks) using the same I18n architecture or by configurating the web server to adapt it’s content based on the preferred languages list defined in the web browser.
I guess there might be a bit more to do here but I am not an SEO warlock/witch and I will leave it to them 🙂
Conclusion
We have all the means to solve important societal challenges like this one trough internationalization.
Not only for foreigners but also because of the collateral benefits it brings the the global information system and ou capacity as a civilization.
The same way discoverability brings the localized content to the right person, I want to advocate for better internationalization and discover as many society glitches I can fix
I am an European freelancer in data protection, internationalization and social uses of process driven technologies. I write on subjects at the intersection of information systems and general interest.
