On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 19:13, Lije Carpenter <[email protected]> wrote: >>>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.
Not quite. The big difference is that Babelfish auto-translation will always be up-to-date -- the "have a person run the text through $TRANSLATION_SERVICE" relies on that person (a) realising that something changed and (b) having the time to run the text through the translation service. So you might as well just stick the big red "this translation is out of date" message on all translated pages, because if they're not out-dated at site launch, they will be after the first change, and you never know when translation volunteers drop off the face of the earth (or into exams, or vacations!), so you might as well assume the worst: the page is outdated. > 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. And that someone would have to be available all year long, and be able to respond in a timely manner to any change. And if the FAQ editor changes "and" to "and/or", then changes it back to "and" the week after, the translator gets to make the change twice, too. Which is, I think, one of the biggest problems: the seemingly never-ending nature of the work. Even if you put in a heroic effort and get the translation up to 100.0% done, it won't stay there for long. And that gets old pretty fast if you're a volunteer. Cheers, -- Philip Newton <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
