Language selection in the app "News"

It would be nice to have a language selection in the app “New”. I don’t speak Arabic or Chinese. I would like to have only the news in English displayed to me.

This does bring up a wider issue - bandwidth. The more languages supported the less bandwidth each one has. It would make sense to use the 2 most predominent languages in the broadcast region. That would instantly half our practical bandwidth. So for North America it would be English and Spanish (sorry Canadiennes but there’s just not that many of you). For other parts of the world it could be Arabic and French? And for Europe it should probably be just English as most countries speak it as a second language or technical language (ever had a electronics design discussion in Finish? I have. Even the Fins struggled!!)

I meant a language selection in the app “News” so you can filter the received messages.

Oh. Right. Sorry. DUH!!

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…or have an option that runs it through Google Translate…

I was just about to write “great idea! Why didn’t I think of that?” and then I thought about it a bit harder. For us its easy but we are not the target audience for this product. Likely they won’t have access to Google Translate which is why they’d be using this service in the first place.

Although, I’ve often wondered about tayloring the service to a given audience. For example, if you could “sell” a given education authority on the product then it would not be beyond them to have their own bespoke service offering. Most any of the satellites that are flying now can carry the Othernet service and so you could have many different downlinks from many different satellites all carrying a bespoke service. The installer simply selects the correct feed and satellite. If you want an all Arabic offering then you simply create it. Same for Italian or whatever. Removing the other languages frees up space to put more Swahili content into the Swahili feed.

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a setting that would allow us to select the language we want to save. all other is routed to the bit bucket. just a matter of preserving storage space.

I do not see the memory requirement as a big problem. The messages are HTML files and do not take up much space. I would limit the language selection to the display only. For example, if I were to delete the messages in Arabic, Arab neighbours would not be able to read them. (Here in Germany now live many refugees from Syria.)

I would bgreet to integrate it crontab into Skylark. It can be used to set up scheduled jobs. For example for deleting certain (old) messages.

Another option may be to only send down one language and build in a translator in to the Skylark image to auto translate for the rest of the languages but that could lead to incorrect translation issues.