We've probably all seen the Google Translate service at: https://translate.google.com/
And many of us have probably seen this integrated into websites, so a reader can select a translation language from a menu on the page. The machine-generated translations are variable. Sometimes they are incomprehensible. And sometimes the translations are pretty good. But they are never as good as an expert human translation. If you hover your mouse over a Google Translate translation, it offers an option, "contribute a better translation". That, combined with the ability to easily switch back to the original page, allows Google to refine their translations. So you can fix errors in the machine translation. Until now this has all been out of the website owner's control. According to this blog post [1] Google is now enabling the suggested translations to go back to the website owner for review and approval. They've also added site-specific glossary support as well as the ability to support multiple translation editors per account (in addition to the unbounded number of readers who can suggest translations). So this is getting interesting. Is this worth enabling for either the podling website or the www.openoffice.org website? Note that this does mean we stop doing NL pages. But this does allow us to quickly expand the scope of our translations, both in supported languages as well as translated pages. It also lowers the barrier to entry for contributors who want to improve the machine generated translations. [1] http://googletranslate.blogspot.com/2012/05/now-you-can-polish-up-googles.html
