[Web4lib] Language Translation on website

[Lars Aronsson]

Sharon Logan wrote:

> We are interested in providing translated pages on our website.  
> We would like to use several languages.  Those I have talked 
> with have used actual staff to translate their pages for them.  
> I am wondering if there is reliable translation software out 
> there for accomplishing this task.

What is good enough depends on your intended audience, so why 
don't you ask them?  Perhaps they are even willing to volunteer in 
the translation work?  At least if it is for a good thing, such as 
a library.

LibraryThing.com is a commercial website that introduced user 
interfaces in multiple languages last fall.  Each language started 
entirely in English and users were asked to "translate this page" 
in a wiki-like fashion.  The system is far from perfect*, but it 
now has a 100% Dutch translation, 97% German, 97% Finnish, 96% 
French, 94% Swedish, 92% Portuguese, 86% Danish, etc.  For the 
Latvian user interface, still only 10% is translated, but if the 
Latvians wish to complain, they have only themselves to blame.
This "complaint mirror" is perhaps the best aspect of it.

Of course, Wikipedia is being translated in exactly this way, both 
contents and user interface, since many years now.  But that's 
entirely a volunteer effort, so you would expect nothing else.

 *) For example, I'm asked to translate "credit" without knowing 
if this is a financial credit or an authorship credit.  In 
Swedish these are two different terms.

You can try automatic translation and see how it turns out.  I'm 
skeptic, but that's because I'm from a small language (Swedish) 
where little research is done in automatic translation, and most 
people can manage to read English.  I've heard that automatic 
translation between English and Arabic has made great advances in 
recent years.  But if you give the automatic software the task to 
translate "credit" without any context, what do you expect it to 
come up with?


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se