Reading the most popular posts of 2009 from the interesting blog Global by design, I´ve found one article about the need for a standard language change / choose icon. Many icons have become quite standard in the web world: rss icon, share icons, etc.. But when it comes to choose language every website create a new way of doing it. Sometimes is a flag, an world icon, a map or hundreds more.

There is now a new iniciative called Language Icon from OMC that proposes this icon to choose languages. What do you think about it? Does it make you to choose your language in a website?

Portuguese speakers have always been very active at Forvo. They have just made their language to be the one with more pronunciations making English number 2 for the first time.

We hope to have soon a Portuguese version of Forvo, and not only portuguese but a dozen more languages too. Don´t wait too much for these new features and if you want to collaborate with any translation in your language you will also be able to do it. Contact us for more info.

Have you tried to use Forvo from a mobile device? It works pretty fine, but when it comes to listen to pronunciations… oops, you won´t hear anything.

We are introducing some changes to give a better mobile experience. So depending on your device you could listen to pronunciations. Here are the requirements:

- Javascript and Flash Lite enabled browser.

We are not happy with this solution but it´s a first step to bring more compatibility. Feel free to comment your mobile experience in this post.

Categories or tags are a different way to learn pronunciations in Forvo. We let users add them so they are creating very interesting groups of words, like these categories: Greetings, Opera or France with hundred of words in many languages.

Now we have found that there are more than 12.000 different tags and this classification was semi-hidden to you. That didn´t make sense. So now you can browse the whole categories list and also filtered by language from the language profile page (i.e. japanese and japanese categories).

Hope you like this feature.

We have introduced a new lovely feature: translations for each word. Thanks to the Google Translate service, now from every word page you will see that word translated from the original language (more than 50 languages in google´s tool) to the interface language (spanish and english at this moment).

So if translations are not perfect blame Google :)

All Forvo members hope you will enjoy and learn more with this new feature.

We have redesigned the language page to help you find who are the best pronouncers in every language. We called these users “The A-team“, so “If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire them. ”

See an example on Russian.

Forvo is a language site so, as you could imagine, we are translating Forvo to more languages in 2009, starting with Forvo in spanish… right now.

Es un placer para los que hacemos Forvo sacar la versión en este idioma, que al fin y al cabo, es el nuestro.

More languages to come soon. And if you´d like to collaborate in any particular language contact us.

We have recently updated the word detail page. See Barcelona pronuciation as an example. The main diferences are:

- MP3 download for every pronunciation.
- The same goes for sharing options. Now the embeddable pronunciations are available for all the pronunciations. If you want to share your own pronunciation, now you can be sure that it won´t change.
- Minor design changes.

We are working on even more features to this page soon.

We have published some information about the new features available for editors. If you would like to collaborate as an editor, read what you could do.

Remember also to share your Forvo love by using these badges.

This post is not about december statistics, because we are no longer including them in the blog. Now you can find all that information in the languages page. The number of pronunciations is updated to the minute so if you are curious just visit it.