> 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.
No way we'd do Babelfish translation! :) > Would some way of auto-tagging the translated FAQs when they become outdated 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? Of course. > 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. And herein lies the crux of the matter, I think. I do not want to be the progenitor of a half-assed effort that doesn't actually help the people it is designed to help. I'd much rather say, "We do not have the resources or ability to do this *right*, so we're not going to do it right now." In the future, when DW has an income, a budget, and we know what things look like? Then, if it is right for the community, we can say: "Hey, we want to spend this budget on translation." We can then hire people to do translation work - either from the community or from a professional service. But that's an "if and only if": if and only if we can do this in a correct, sustainable method will it happen. Until then, DW will be English only for the site language. > 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? Federation won't be like importing or exporting your journal. It would be like adding someone to your watch list, except instead of that person being a DW user, they're a Foobarbazwhee.it user. Their posts will be available on your reading page without you or them having to do anything. (That's the ideal state, of course we haven't yet solved the issues of: what if you don't want your posts to ever leave DW or the other site? How does security work cross-site? Etc etc. But we're thinking about them for when we do get to this project.) -- Mark Smith / xb95 [email protected] _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
