Language Translations

The entire catalog of 11,000+ Birds of the World (BOW) species accounts is available in Spanish and Portuguese, with other languages ​​to follow. This game-changing new feature promises to make the science content available in BOW accessible to new audiences throughout the world. We’ve already made BOW open-access in many developing nations through our partner program (people in most of South and Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and parts of the Middle East can now access BOW at no cost). Naturally, the next step was to make the resource multilingual so that the content flows more freely to those who need it. We hope you’ll help carry this message into your community so BOW can be accessed for new education, science, and conservation projects.

We are employing a third-party machine translation technology service called DeepL, which can translate massive volumes of content into other languages ​​with remarkable speed and accuracy. Please report any translation errors on this feedback form. In addition to systematic errors of technical terms, we expect spelling errors or some awkward phrasing. With your help, our team will begin tracking and fixing these errors.

What is translated, what is not?

1. Text: the body of each species account will be translated. Sign in with your username to see the language option feature in the main header.
2. Common names do NOT automatically translate. To achieve the best experience, see the instructions above.
3. Galleries and captions do not translate.
4. All the front-end, non-species pages do not translate.
5. Plurals and possessives: the translator tool has some issues with plurals and possessives. We are seeking ways to manage this.

Sign into Birds of the World with your Cornell Lab/eBird username.

In the header, change the Language from Language (en) to Idioma (es)

Additionally, under your user profile find My preferences, change your common name preference to your preferred language. (The common names dataset is on a different database so this requires a second step).

Support our work

If you would like to help fund the Cornell Lab in support of our efforts to expand open access and multilingual capability to ornithological materials, please donate here or contact us.