Going global

[Birger]

Interesting feature that just got installed on Bens site, I wonder just how well the translations would work.
I can see the complications here though of trying to tie it in with the Cat-eLog.

http://www.predatoryfishkeepers.com/for ... -languages

[nicofish]

not very well I just translated it into spanish and the translation is not entirely correct its understandable but I can see it getting complicated considering the only sentence I translated was the first.

[Jools]

You can already do this on the site using google translate?

Jools

[amiidae]

Yes, the software translation is done thru Google and that is just one part of it. Once you set your default language (only for member), the entire site will be translated into your prefered language. Then you can simply read and make post based on your prefered language directly and the receiving end will see your post based on their default language selection.

Pretty new but cool stuff.

[Jools]

Looks cool.

I could see it adding a layer of work to the mod team as you would, in many instances, have to second guess a translation. Bearing in mind many of our mod team have English as a second or third language, asking them to moderate a translation adds complexity. Given some recent posts, that's quite an overhead. Simply put, we have enough fun (room for misunderstanding) moderating one language.

So, anyone can point Google at a page to translate it. The bit that's not available at present is translating fresh input (a new post or reply (or pm, my cats etc)) from a non-English language to English. It's not too hard to do, actually however this, at present, strikes me as one of those technically straightforward, operationally complex things.

One to watch for now.

Jools

[MatsP]

I tried translating nicofish's post to Swedish (as it's the only other language I know). It made mostly sense, but some tiny typographical errors in nicofish's original text made it insert some nonsense, as "its" means something different than "it's". This sort of problem happens for anything that the google translate struggles to understand, and I have tried google translate from German, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese to English. Most of the time you get the gist of the content, but it's far from perfect, and often it only makes complete sense if you can "guess" what the mistranslations was actually meant to be.

The benefit, as I see it, would be those that don't have enough English to express what they want to express - but I find that more often than not, I struggle to understand posts by those who DO have English as their native language...

--
Mats

[nicofish]

mats im not sure how swedish works. but in languages with conjugations the diffrence in tenses or commas can make bug differences.

in other languages the translation effort could be disastrous. there is a web site that is going around the "teen" world and what it does its translates stuff into a language than back into english and somtimes it just makes absolutely no sense.

at this point the standard language is english so... (keep in mind it is my second language so no racism intended)

I feel that it could be problematic when people are starting to post in different languages and using more complex structures. i study french as well and I only use translators as dictionaries.

tho I will admit they have gotten much better over the years.

[Jools]

OK, so going to pass on implementing this.

Jools