BIG NEWS! Birds of the World is now available in Spanish!

We’re proud to announce Birds of the World is now available in Spanish, with other languages to follow!

This game-changing new feature promises to make the science content available in BOW accessible to new audiences throughout the world. We’ve already made BOW open-access in many developing nations through our partner program. Naturally, the next step was to make the resource multilingual so that the content flows more freely to those who need it. We hope you’ll help carry this message into your community so BOW can be accessed for new education, science, and conservation projects.  If all goes well we’ll begin to include other languages.

We invite you to take a look!

1. Sign into Birds of the World with your Cornell Lab/eBird username.
2. In the header, change the Language from English (en) to Spanish (es)
3. Additionally, in My preferences, change your common name preference to your preferred language. (This requires a second step.)

We hope you’ll help carry this message into your communities so Birds of the World  can continue to underpin avian education, science, and conservation projects around the world. Assuming the translations are well received, we’ll begin to include other languages, such as French, Portuguese, and others.

You can read more about this initiative here, including some tips on what to expect and how you can report systematic errors. We’re eager to know how well this first translation project progresses, so please tell us what you think!

What is translated, what is not?

The BOW platform is highly dynamic and pulls information from various databases to create an integrated whole. Therefore, some categories of information were not translated in this first release.

1. Text: the body of each species account will be translated. The front-end pages (About, Partner, News, etc.) are not yet translated.
2. Common Names do NOT automatically translate. To achieve the best experience, see the instructions in the photo above.
3. Galleries and captions do not translate.
4. Plurals and possessives: the translator tool has some issues with plurals and possessives. We are seeking ways to manage this.

How translations are achieved

We are employing a third-party machine translation technology service called DeepL, which can translate massive volumes of content into other languages ​​with remarkable speed and accuracy.

It’s important to know that machine translations are a powerful but imperfect tool. While we found DeepL to be superior on BOW text, the system occasionally misinterprets a technical word or phrase. Typically, these errors are systematic and easily replaced (which we intend to do a few more times until the system is fine-tuned). This fine-tuning requires us to build a glossary of systematic translation errors and feed the service with accurate translations. PLEASE REPORT ANY SYSTEMATIC ERRORS TO OUR TEAM. In addition to systematic errors of technical terms, we expect spelling errors or some awkward phrasing. With your help, our team will begin tracking and fixing these errors.

By the way, in the rare case where the meaning of the text becomes ambiguous due to errors in translation, the English version will remain the account of record.

How to report errors

Please report errors on this feedback form:

If you have any questions, please reach out to Fernando Medrano, BOW Latin American Lead ([email protected]).

Support the Cornell Lab

If you would like to help support the Lab, including our efforts to provide future language translations and expanding global access to the resource, please contact us or donate here.