We all need a recognized icon to represent “translate this.” We’ve got one for feeds and social bookmarking, but where’s our translate icon? A lot of folks simply use flags, but that’s a bad idea because they’re “nationalistic, and represent ideals, boundaries, and political beliefs, but do not represent a language.”

Joe Lee has developed a few icons for use in the OLPC project, and they look good. The only problem I have with them is in trying to make them work at 16×16 pixels. I developed the icon above (and the 16×16 version) to support the new Bookmark Share (& Translate) feature in bSuite (see it at work). It’s simply a mashup of Joe’s work (this) with the feed icon (there’s an Adobe Illustrator version in the developer pack).

This particular icon has a few problems (it could easily be confused with “reload”), and I’d love to see something better. Any suggestions (that fit a 16 x 16 square)?

It looks like bstat has been localized for Japan! With that in mind, I’d love to hear from international users about what I can do to make localization easier. There will be some big changes in the transition to bsuite, and it might be a good time to make sure I’m properly supporting WP’s translation tables and localization features.

tags: bstat, bsuite, japanese localization, language, language translation, localization, localization features, plugin, translation tables, wordpress, wordpress plugin