>>Perhaps a workable solution would be for multilingual volunteers to offer
>>their help in having a
>> support wiki that translates the FAQs (et al) for users who are primary
>> speakers of languages other than English?
>If you're talking about an automatic translation, fair enough, and I have no
>opinion either way.
Leaving the translation at Babelfish level is no different than having a
person, say, just run the text through Babelfish or Google on their own. As
anyone who's ever tried to use automated translation can attest to, the results
are choppy at best and run to the downright inaccurate at other times. There
would still need to be someone to read through the translated results and tweak
them to make sure they'll be properly understood.
>At some point last year, during one or other of LJ's crisises, I had occasion
>to consult the the FAQ.
>The info I was getting was wrong and/or out of date.
Would some way of auto-tagging the translated FAQs when they become outdated be
feasible? As a big message in red at the top of the page?
I think the anger and frustration you cite is the precise sort of reaction DW
wants to avoid: either multilingual support needs to be comprehensive, or it
probably shouldn't be done at all. I suspect that a separate site with a
separate staff with their own fiscal support base would be needed to guarantee
that everything gets updated in a timely manner across the localized sites.
Which leads me to a tangential thought: should cloning a journal across
(currently theoretical) multiple language-differentiated DW sites be something
that has to be paid for as a service, above and beyond simply being a paid
account?
Thanks,
principia_coh
Alexis Carpenter
_______________________________________________
dw-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
