Hi everyone!
We're very pleased to announce that Flat now speaks Italian! It may come as a surprise for you, but it did for us too!
Let me tell you the story behind this wonderful feature that will allow thousands of non-English speakers to compose music.
Flat was already multilingual, it was available in English, French and Spanish. Those are the languages that members of the Flat team speak and we try to always keep the translations updated as new sentences in the need of being translated are added everyday.
Adding a new language is therefore a struggle that we've been eager to solve for quite some time now, without the means to do so unfortunately, as it requires maintenance.
Italian was the language we wanted to translate first, as a lot of music words are taken from this language and because the number of our Italian users kept increasing. Unfortunately, nobody in the team speaks Italian! Too bad!
Two members of the team moving to Rome
It is not completely related, but two members of the team (Romain, and myself, Julien) were thinking about moving to Rome for quite some time now. As you may know, we are a distributed company, which basically means that we can work from wherever we want.
Romain and I wanted to take advantage of it by moving to a place we didn't went to yet, and as we always loved Italian culture, food and history, we decided that Rome was the perfect place to be. We're moving there in about two weeks and very excited about it!
When we announced that to Pierre, our CEO, he thought it would be the perfect occasion for us to find some native speaker willing to take the time to translate our whole website.
Nothing is possible without the community
Little did we know about the eagerness of our Italian users to see Flat available in their language. We sometimes receive messages in Italian on our support and try to help them in any way that we can.
But yesterday, we received a message from an Italian music teacher, who spoke a perfect English, and wanted to know if he could help translating Flat in his language so he could use it with his students.
We gave him a way to help us translate some sentences in order to allow his students to start using Flat, but we were really impressed by his willingness to translate the entire website! We never expected that he would translate it all, but he did!
So, Italian speakers, a big round of applause to him, and thank you very much!
Cheers,
Julien