Announcing New International Features on docs.microsoft.com

This post was written by Jeff Sandquist, General Manager in the Azure Growth and Ecosystem team.

We are happy to announce the release of new international features on docs.microsoft.com. The new features are targeting international markets and are meant to improve the international user experience. Our new features include a new and improved locale picker, right-to-left language support and a mouse hover translation display experience.

New Locale Picker

Our new locale picker is available from the footer of all docs pages. Clicking the link will take you to the locale picker page where you will see:

  • The current language - shown on the top of the page and bolded in the list.
  • A region filter that can be applied through the world map.
  • Search field, through which a language can be found.

Once you click to select your new language, you will be taken back to the page you came from with the content localized in the newly selected language.

Locale Picker

Bidirectional Languages Support (Right-to-Left Support)

Bidirectional (BiDi) languages like Arabic and Hebrew, are also known as RTL (right-to-left) languages. BiDi languages are characterized by:

  • Document direction - overall text flows from right to left
  • Numerals flow and read from left to right
  • Cursor and text selection follows text and numeral flow
  • All UI elements follow the right-to-left direction, which is a mirror of the LTR UI.

Bidirectional Languages

Mouse Hover Translation Display

In order to encourage all our international customers to contribute to translation improvement, we are empowering them with the full meaning and context of the content by providing the English equivalent of the translated content, by hovering over the text with the mouse. If the content is machine translated, the feature is on by default, and it is off if the content is human translated. Customers can turn on/off the mouse hover-over feature from the disclaimer on top of the article.

Mouse hover-over Feature

Feedback

We want to hear your feedback on how we can make our international experience better. Reach out to us on Twitter for quick updates and questions.