I'm a closet linguist and have dabbled in many, many languages, but I would say I am only fluent in Mandarin and French. I would classify myself a pseudo-techie: knowing enough to make myself dangerous, but not enough to actually build anything of interest. I have access to one of the largest global translator networks. I also have connections with the Simeon Trust in Chicago, which focuses on training and equipping pastors or teachers in teaching the Bible.
Jannie, does your network of translators have a particular technology platform/tool they use to speed up their work? Or is it just a standard blogging platform where they translate however they want and then upload it and have it published to the site by an editor?
James, I noticed you had something to add, but I couldn't read the full message...could you repost it to this branch?
Yeah sure. I was really interested in the question about a platform/tool to enable translation. IFES has a commitment to producing everything in English, Spanish and French. We are currently emailing .doc files and .odt files back and forth with our translators. This process works, however I'm sure it could be better.
We're also in the process of building a resource library and the aim is to make these available for crowdsource translation (aka I'm going to be building a translation platform). I would be interested to see what current systems look like.
No, I don't think they use any special tool/technology to help in their translations. We run on Wordpress. However, I can imagine collaborative translation happening over things like Google docs or Liveblog.
Ahh yes. WordPress has several very nice plugins for translations. One of my colleagues has just started a multilingual WordPress installation. scriptureengagement.ifesworld.org.
James, please loop me in if you see a need to build any kind of translation workflow and let me know how your colleague likes the mulitlingual wordpress setup.
Certainly will +Christopher. Is that something that you have worked on before?
Somewhat. For my master's thesis I built an interactive translation system, but it wasn't a translation workflow. We had some good results, but it was designed for people who can't speak the target language, rather than a bilingual person translating to/from languages they know. I'm interested in a translation community/workflow for the reasons outlined in my response to Nate's branch: branch.com
Interesting. It would be good to have a chat with you about how that all worked at some point!
I'll let you know when I start planning out translation workflows. You can see part one happening in the comments on this article though: ifesworld.org
That's pretty cool! I'm surprised at the quality that Bing is outputting. Was it pretty easy to setup?
Once I got my head around the documentation (or there lack of). Next stages for the comments is to save the translations to the database (saves API calls) and then allow users to correct the translation.
Very cool! Have you hit the quota where you need to start paying?
Not yet! I really should keep an eye on that one to be honest!
Thanks for your feedback! Team Branch
