Sun 20 May 2007
If you notice at the bottom of my posts you will now see links which will automatically use translate.google.com to translate that post. Go ahead, try it. I’ll wait.
In the global community which is the web I recognize that not everyone will know English. While not perfect, automatic translation is the most efficient way to bridge that gap. It would be nice if I could get all the languages listed on the olpc website translation page. Sadly even a working free Thai translator is hard to come by. If you know of a reliable free translation service for a language I do not support please comment on this post.
This was all done via the WordPress plugin system which is quite nice. Version 0.1 of the Translate This plugin is available under the GPL license. To install simply untar the files contents in your WordPress plugins directory and enable it through the plugin tab on the admin console.
May 21st, 2007 at 12:09 am
hehe, “posts” traduit par “poteaux”, plutôt comique… et difficile a lire
I known this is not a easy task, but automatic translator should use the context more to select the right translation for a word. Maybe a tag system could help them to find the right context for a post (or a poteaux).
May 21st, 2007 at 12:18 am
Hi John,
I sort-of like the idea of automatic translation, so when I saw your post appear on planet.gnome.org, I thought I’d give it a try (for German – I’m a native speaker ). Hilarious ! It took some twisting to figure out the “stakes” (Pfosten) and the “approximate” (Ungefähr), among other things, though…
May 21st, 2007 at 1:26 am
哈哈，真有趣
May 21st, 2007 at 5:21 am
That was owful!
I’ve tried the Russian translation and I find it so hard to understand
May 21st, 2007 at 7:42 am
oh my god, the german version is really not easy to understand, it even got typos in the german words. i think i understood two sentences in the end…
i once used such tools at school to translate text from german to english and back again, and used the results for some homework papers. the teacher was not amused and reduced my points, and it looks like such tools have not much improved in the last 7 years. :-/
May 21st, 2007 at 9:56 am
Haha! Funny translation, albeit quite difficult to read and understand in the new context it has been put in. “Pfosten” as a translation of “post” is entertaining already, but
the word “Steckverbindungsverzeichnis” made my day:
http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&q=Steckverbindungsverzeichnis&btnG=Google-Suche&meta=
May 21st, 2007 at 4:53 pm
Woo! Thanks for this. (Heh. Wonder if it’s possible to hook up posts to Canonical’s Rosetta thing and get the community to translate them.)
– Chris
May 21st, 2007 at 6:05 pm
Um actually google allows you to do this already. If you click on a paragraph it give you the option to give a better translation. Not sure how much I like the idea of the community doing this for a closed database though.
May 21st, 2007 at 6:08 pm
Заибись!
May 21st, 2007 at 6:09 pm
what do you think about Esperanto? I thik it’s more auto-translatable language
May 21st, 2007 at 10:41 pm
Interesting enough the translation editing is only available for ar, ru and zh-CN. Suxzors
May 22nd, 2007 at 5:33 am
Translation correction is only available for ar, ru and zh because they use google own statistical translation engine. Other engines are not Google developed so Google is not interested in improving them. Actually I don’t agree with comment #4 by Peter A. Shevtsov. I think Russian translation is not that bad, it’s just the quality is not even. Some part of the translation are pretty good despite the fact that the source is not easy. But some parts are really bad to the point that translation inverts the meaning! As I understand Google has trouble finding big sources of parallel text that’s why the quality is so variable.
June 14th, 2007 at 5:58 am
“Maybe a tag system could help them to find the right context for a post (or a poteaux).”
indeed, it would be nice to have tags like \unstranslatable{ }, or \proper_noun{},
or even to add part-of-speech information to a word, when we know it’s a homonym : “\verb{time} flies” vs. “time \verb{flies}”…