New Feature: Multilingual Common Name Display Preferences

BOW Team May 22, 2020
Eurasian GriffonGyps fulvus

We are happy to report that users can now display common names for each species in over 30 languages.

To set your common name preference to French, for example:

Click the icon in upper part of screen and select Preferences.

 

Then toggle to your preferred language, in this case French, and click SAVE at bottom of page. eBird supports bird names in 10 alternate versions of English and more than 30 languages so you can always use the bird names you prefer.

Then navigate back to Birds of the World. There is no ‘one click’ option to get back to BOW from eBird preferences at the moment, so just put the URL in the address bar.

Now you can see as well as search for common names in French. For example:

Species search

Common Name Display

Taxonomy Explorer

 

When common name preferences are set but translations are incomplete (meaning not all 10,000+ species have translations), English common names are displayed by default. There are some places in BOW where the species common name is not yet translated, such as in the media, maps, and main body of the text. We will be working in the future to make the display of common name preferences function more broadly across the site.

Thanks for being patient with us as we released this feature.

Want to work with us on a set of translations? If your language is missing from this list, contact us.