allow comments and discussions to be translatable
Pirate Praveen
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In "Pirate Movement of India", our members are native speakers of many languages. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_with_official_status_in_India)
In a recent discussion one member had to use their mother tongue so that they can clearly express their idea - https://www.loomio.org/d/tu97i2az/loksabha-elections-2014 But that would automatically exclude people who speak other languages but can understand English. In this case I manually translated all comments in Malayalam to English and posted as my comments. I would like loomio to be able to allow this as a feature ie, each text content needs to be translatable so that anyone can offer translations and people can choose their preferred languages to communicate.
mix irving Tue 11 Feb 2014 6:40AM
yeah I saw that! this is one of the reasons we haven't made Malayalam a language which is easy to select yet. The reason it says "Translating to" is that it looks on the list of select-able languages in the app, and Malayalam isn't one of them. A little bug.
The bigger issue is still that we have no automated way to get Malayalam translations. This means we'll have to disable this particular iteration till someone has time to build the ability for users to contribute a translation.
I'll talk to some people in the open source community. If you know of any Rails developers, we'd love more people helping out!
Simon Tegg Tue 18 Feb 2014 2:08AM
Hey, we liked this feature so much we wrote a blog post [deprecated] about it!
@praveenarimbrathod
Balasankar C Mon 22 Sep 2014 1:47PM
@simontegg
I can't find that blog post anymore. :(
Simon Tegg Mon 22 Sep 2014 8:24PM
@balasankarchelamat We withdrew the feature temporarily because we weren't happy with it and had to withdraw the blog post as well. Now the blog is out of date...
Jacob Gadikian Tue 7 Oct 2014 9:49PM
I'd like to toss in my .02 here.
For two years I taught a group of multilingual students who had multilingual parents. YES! Furthermore, this is a great opportunity to train translation engines. Since that experience, I've always wanted (but lack some of the chops needed) to make multilingual forum software that allows the user to set the view-language and for users to specify which languages they have full fluency in.
Users fully fluent in the the original and target language could then make corrections to what the translation system did. I've been dtying for Google to make such a product, though their translation system now does cover, for example, (surprised cursing in Chinese) to WTF, which I've got to say is pretty impressive. Still, I think that there's a lot of room for improvement in translation, and systems like those discussed here have got to be one of the fastest ways to achieve those improvements.
Alanna Irving Wed 8 Oct 2014 3:50AM
@jacobgadikian that's pretty much how Loomio works right now, except without the ability to provide manual corrections to automatic translations. But it's a functional good start at least.
Jacob Gadikian Wed 8 Oct 2014 6:08AM
Alanna:
I noticed-- sorry my comment wasn't so much a "we should do" as a "Hot damn! Are doing! Awesome!"
Jacob GadikianE-mail: [email protected] ( [email protected] )
SKYPE: faddat
Phone/SMS: +86 186-2612-6079
Alanna Irving Wed 8 Oct 2014 9:02AM
Hahah great! My favorite type of comment!
Shakoat Hossain Sun 5 Jul 2015 11:18AM
Thanks for a quite informative discussion. Keep it up buddies! https://plus.google.com/+ShakoatHossain/
Pirate Praveen · Tue 11 Feb 2014 5:11AM
@mixirving now it just shows "translate to" without any language mentioned and when clicked, just stuck at "loading..." :( Thanks for activating Malayalam!