I have been thinking about how it would be to manage the language issue on posts, and I came across the idea of translating the content itself, the posts.
This could be implemented this way in the UI:
Title
Content bla bla bla bla
Want to translate this?
If clicked the question about translation, the user who clicked would be asked for logging in (or register)¹. Then, a side-by-side screen would open, where in the left side would be the original content. In the right side, the first thing to do would be to choose the language, and then simply translate the content.
¹ The need to have an account would be to register the name of the translator, to avoid making malicious translations. But seen that it’s also possible to create anonymous posts, this could be different too.
Then, when a post would have a translation, it would appear this way:
Title
French | Rusian
Content bla bla bla bla
Want to translate this?
This way, the posts could be very easily more accessible, and the translations would be made in a voluntary way, by community.
I really think this would be a great feature for WriteFreely.
I don’t think that translations should all be made by the community. As a bilingual person I translate my own posts (and I am missing a translation feature), and I know the words that I want to use for each language, so I would want to add the translations myself instead of opening up to the community.
I’m not against the community translation feature though, it would be nice if others could translate my posts to languages I don’t know, but with this would come the problem of having to review translations, and if it’s a language that neither the original poster or staff knows, then there’s really not much way of moderating it, and I thing that would be a problem.
TL;DR: Adding translations to posts should be implemented, allowing the community to translate them should be optional, and there would still be a problem with moderating content.
2 Likes
For sure, the author could make a translation, even before sending the post.
About the moderation issues, it will always be that way. An option could be to disable having your content translated, or only to some languages, to avoid having to review them.
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Wouldn’t this defeat the whole point of having community translations enabled? I think that if I were enabling them for myself, I would allow langauges I personally don’t know so that my content would be translated to as many languages as possible, with the consequence being that I can’t review them. Although maybe in second thought, it wouldn’t be so bad to run the translation through a translate service to a language I can understand to make some sort of rudimentary review.