’Sup. I’m a fourth year computer science major at UCLA. I like web applications and distributed systems and I care about using them to solve problems and make people happy. I interned at Khan Academy last summer and will be returning there as a full time developer when I graduate. This is my website.
More Videos in More Languages
- September 10, 2012
Today I shipped my last big project as a Khan Academy intern. Here is our homepage as it existed last week:
And here it is now:
What, you don't see it? Let me zoom in for you:
Ooh!
Aah!
¡Que guapo!
For the past couple weeks I've been working on the technical beginnings of Khan Academy's internationalization effort. Bilal, our Dean of Translations, already has huge volunteer efforts underway in the areas of dubbing and subtitling our content but until now our all of our dubbed videos were sitting on YouTube without any exposure on our site. As of today, that's no longer the case: we now have pages for videos in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Indonesian, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Swahili, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Bengali, Thai, Mandarin, and Xhosa. That's over 6,500 videos in total, and more languages are on the way.
When I began this project I quickly discovered that internationalization is a complex problem that envelops technology, design, and culture. Luckily–and this is definitely a recurring theme for KA interns–I got to bounce ideas and code off of some very talented people. Take Chris, for example: in a past life he worked on internationalization for the Yahoo! homepage. Huge thanks to all the KA devs and non-devs alike who supported this and helped get it shipped.
I'd love to see KA.org grow into a fully international site with content and communities in every language under the sun. These new video pages get us about 2% of the way there, but it's the first 2%.