Announcements: October 2007 Archives

Hi5 is pleased to add Turkish (Türkçe) to our growing set of supported languages.  Turkish is spoken by 65–73 million people worldwide.  The absence of gender and the latin script made this one of our easier translations.

This is our tenth language with many more to come.  Please visit the Hi5 Language Forum for more information about our translations and localization.

We've been busy releasing new features and fixes.   Here's a roundup of some of the latest changes on hi5:

• You'll find a new design for friend updates on your home page and profile pages.  Updates are more concise and organized.
• There's a new 'What's New' system that keeps accurate, real-time counts of your photo comments, profile comments and friend requests.
• The Groups Home Page now highlights your friends groups, so you can find more interesting groups.
• Multi-message delete is now available to anyone with 100+ friends, eventually everyone will get this feature.
• As mentioned already, Hi5 is now localized in Polish.

Hi5 is pleased to add Polish to its growing set of languages.  Polish is spoken by 38 million people in Poland, Belarus and Ukraine, plus 3-10 million emigrants, making it second to Russian among Slavic nations.  The Polish language presents unique challenges to localization as nouns have five potential gender classes and verbs have specific inflections based on gender, person and number.

¡Oy vey!

My colleague Christophe has started a new moderated Hi5 Group named the hi5 Language Forum.  He describes it as:

hi5 Language Group is a discussion forum for people who have suggestions or want to talk about hi5 internationalization, localization, translation and language issues. Please join and invite others in a lively discussion. hi5 staff regularly participate in the discussion to answer your questions and listen to product suggestions.

We'll do our best to answer all questions but English, French, Russian, and Spanish are preferred. Thanks.

So far we've had interest in user supported Albanian and Greek translations along with fixes to some of the existing languages.