French localization for API video calls

As we've mentioned before, the feedback we get from users, like yourself, is invaluable to our mission. Do not hesitate to contact us.

Earlier this year we shipped a heavily requested feature — a localized version of our API video call UI, in French. We had multiple requests from French speaking customers.

You can swap our UI from English to French for any video call by opening your browsers Console and entering setDailyLang('fr'). The UI will shift from English to French.

To revert just enter setDailyLang('en-us').

Background: our process designing localized UI

Designing localized UI is no simple task. There are hundreds of strings of text that needed to be converted. To start the process we developed a Google Sheet that captured all of the UI strings.

This was a fairly manual process and involved joining live video calls for all the possible user scenarios. For example, we'd join a meeting alone and copy/paste strings into the spreadsheet; then we'd start a screen share and copy/paste any new strings; and repeat.

Once we captured all of the strings we then shared the sheet for translation with our French partner. After Pierre translated the sheet our design team then duplicated a working Sketch file and began to make design updates for UI components where the longer, French strings, would break our interface.

This allowed us to identify places in our UI where we would either:

1. Update our UI logic to accommodate longer string lengths or…
2. …ask our French partner for shorter translations

With the logic updates we've made to our product, we're excited to soon support other localizations!

Once we had a final spreadsheet of strings, we then implemented the French lang updates and shipped them live. Having a live version of our UI in French was the true test. While the design exercise certainly helped, we now QA'd the product for any issues — responsive layouts, etc.

Implementing French UI for your API video calls

Developers, it's very easy to set your calls in French. (Please note that only our in-call UI is localized, for your end user. We have not localized the dashboard interface that developers see while building.)

If you'd like to manually set the language, here's how you set the default language for your Daily.co domain:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" -d '{"properties":{"lang":"fr"}}' https://api.daily.co/v1/

You can also set the lang property to fr when you construct the Daily.co callFrame object. Here's an example code snippet of a video call embed with language set to French. Read our docs here, for more top-level configuration options.

<script crossorigin src="https://unpkg.com/@daily-co/daily-js"></script>
<script>
  callFrame = window.DailyIframe.createFrame({
    lang: 'fr',
  });
  callFrame.join({ url: 'https://your-team.daily.co/hello' })
</script>

Or you can call callFrame.setDailyLang('fr') any time after you join() the call.

We hope to bring localization to other languages in the future. If you need a localized version for your API needs, please reach out to us! Cheers.

Photo by Augustin de Montesquiou on Unsplash.