UkuTabs Now Speaks 10 Languages

For most of its life UkuTabs has been an English site with a worldwide audience, which always felt slightly backwards. Ukulele players in Jakarta, Mexico City, São Paulo and Warsaw have been using it for years, in a language many of them do not speak at home. That is fixed now.

UkuTabs is available in ten languages, and this time it is not a corner of the site. It is all of it.

Which languages?

Spanish, German, Indonesian, Portuguese, French, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Polish and Czech, alongside English. In the language menu each one appears in its own language, so you are looking for Español, Deutsch, Indonesia, Português, Français, Italiano, Nederlands, 日本語, Polski or Čeština rather than a flag you have to decode.

What exactly is translated?

The whole site. Not the guides and a couple of tools, which is where it stood before, but everything:

• Every song page, all twenty thousand and change
• Every tool: the tuner, chord diagrams, scales, the chord namer, the metronome, the tab converter and the keys tool
• Every chord page and every key page, with the theory written in the language rather than swapped word by word
• All the guides and the song lists
• The homepage, the artist and letter archives, the genre and difficulty hubs, and the charts

That includes the parts people actually touch mid-song: the transposer, the autoscroll controls, the chord pop-ups and every button and label around the sheet.

What is not translated, and why

Song chords and lyrics stay exactly as they are, in every language. This is deliberate.

A chord is a chord. Translating the sheet would mean rewriting the thing you came to play, and a lyric line in the wrong language is not a translation, it is a different song. So the interface speaks your language while the music does not move. Chord letters stay international too. No German H in place of B, no letters quietly turned into do-re-mi in the diagrams, because a chord chart has to mean the same thing everywhere.

How do I switch language?

There is a language menu in the header on every page. Pick a language and you stay exactly where you are: switch to Dutch while reading a song and you get that same song in Dutch, not a trip back to the homepage.

The site will never move you on its own, either. No guessing your language from your browser and redirecting you somewhere you did not ask to go. You land where you clicked, and you change it only if you want to. If you prefer English, nothing about your UkuTabs changes.

The URLs are predictable as well, since they are the English address with a language prefix, so ukutabs.com/nl/b/bruno-mars/count-on-me/ is the Dutch version of the same page. That makes them safe to bookmark and share.

Was this machine translated?

Not in the way that question usually means. Every language went through a review pass for voice, idiom and the music vocabulary, because music terminology is exactly where automatic translation falls over. A “key” is not the same word as a key that opens a door, a “sharp” is not an adjective, and a “bar” chord has nothing to do with drinking. Each language got its own terminology list, and the translated pages were read rather than trusted.

It will not be perfect everywhere. If you hit a line that reads strangely in your language, tell me and I will fix it. That feedback is worth more than another pass by me guessing.

Frequently asked questions

If your language is not on the list yet, it is not a no. Send me a message and tell me which one, because the order this rolls out in should be decided by the people actually waiting for it.