WiserEarth Group Support
Help and advice for WiserEarth groups, discussions about groups and examples of successful groups.
GROUP DETAILS
Created: Feb 20, 2008
Updated: Nov 19, 2009
Membership: Open
Public
What do our international users really need?
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Comments (1 - 6 of 6)
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I wonder if we're thinking of making better (re)use of machine translation tools like Google Translate?
If we can integrate it onto the site somehow and use it to translate only the content (not the interface, which would use high-quality translation by our translators), then I think we would help a lot of our users.
For example, I always have to take extra steps to understand what a non-English page is about, by going to google translate, copy pasting the URL or content, and getting some idea about the content. If it were easier, say... "view this in "... that'd be cool. Google is especially cool for they have a "Auto-detect language" feature which solve the "What language is this?" question.
Here's a nice implementation of Google Translate's API, enabling you to text-chat in your languge with people around the world chatting with their respective language --> http://www.babelwith.me (basically, you set your language preference, e.g. English, and every incoming message gets translated to English, and your outgoing message gets translated to whatever language is chosen at the receiving end... automagically).
I can see a similar scenario used for our messaging system the way Gmail is implementing them in one of their Labs feature http://lifehacker.com/5261546/gmail-labs-automatically-translates-your-email
Summing up, we need to facilitate internationalization/localization in terms of interface, content and communication.
The main issue would probably have to do with content in private groups, and privacy of user's conversations. So, there needs to be an opt-in terms of use somehow upon first use of this feature for 'private' stuff. |
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@Theresa: Linking two items (e.g. two solutions) that are the same content but in different languages shouldn't be too hard - its basically a new relationship type and since each record has a language associated with it, it should be easy to show that A is English and B is Spanish. That should solve most issues. Then the question becomes how are international users going to use WiserEarth, particularly in terms of their language settings. For sure they will want to view the user interface in their language, but then comes the question of what content do they want to view. This could be any and all content, content in only their language, or content in their language and English (or other languages). Since we don't have much content in other languages it probably makes sense to default to 'all content' for now.
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Hi! We are one org that will be needing the translation bit, particularly for solutions. Note that we have so far been adding solutions as separate items in Spanish, Portuguese and English, even though they are translations of the same 250 items. It would be great if folks could click to translate a solution and have them linked, which I see is what you were describing (but just thought I'd comment here to confirm this is important). I'm just wondering what Phase II means, since mid-year I was told this would be ready late in the year. No rush, but it would be good to have a realistic sense. Keep up the good work! [And please let us know when the next half of the Portuguese phrases for translation are ready as we'd like to get going with those.]
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One of the main issues also is how we ensure that any changes made to a main page (about/help etc) is reflected in all of the translated pages. At the moment, I mark down when a change is made to a page manually, but this is going to be tricky when we have x number of translations of pages in x number of languages. Any ideas?
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Probably need a way to set the language of a record after it has been created. At the moment I think you can only set it once, upon creation. With more international users this will become more of an issue.
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Hey Camilla,
We considered a "cascading" system where changes to the "parent" page would get reflected in the translated pages, but when you consider this system, it really breaks down very quickly once you have changes to pages and translations.
For example, we'll take a organization page created in English, and then translated in French and Spanish. What information would we want ported over whenever changes to the English document has been made? Would we want the contact information or the About section in the French/Spanish version to get overridden with English text suddenly? Probably not, cause then the translations would be lost and you'd end up with English text on a translated page.
And then, what if the reverse were true? What is someone updated the information on the French translation? Would that cascade up and down to the English and Spanish? Probably not, cause there isn't much value in having French text suddenly appear on the English page. It would appear then that there isn't much value in applying changes across all translations, because the content is simply different and the changes unpredictable.
Instead, the linking system we would have is just to connect the pages together, but not to automatically share any information. So a user clicking on the French page would see that this page is available in English and Spanish. The information may not be up to date, but that's always going to be the danger of hosting translations. Unless we have an automatic computer translation system, the best we can do is flag a translation and say that the parent page has been changed to notify users that this page merits re-translating.
In response to Camilla's question, we could possibly come up with a more sophisticated system of handling multiple pages in x languages, but that would probably be overkill for the majority of our users, as well as suck up all our technical resources and expertise. I'd wager that if we presented our users with a translated interface, allowed them to create content or submit translations for existing content, and let them toggle their language preferences, we are providing enough to accommodate 95% of our target audience. It would only be the super power users who might need more.