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VeskoP
Posts: 580
Joined: Mon Apr 05, 2004 8:10 pm

Machine Translation Available

Post: # 4314Post VeskoP »

The forum can now be easily viewed in languages other than English via the icons in the top left corner. The translation is carried out automatically by computers and thus is far from perfect, but it may *occasionally* be at a fairly acceptable level. We hope this step is going to help people who do not know English well to find and access the forum. The currently available languages are:
  • Spanish
    German
    Portugese
    French
    Italian
    Japanese
    Chinese
    Korean
    Russian
All except Russian currently use the Google Language Tools (http://www.google.com/language_tools). Russian is currently provided by PROMT (http://www.e-promt.com/en/)

The credit for the idea goes to Bomohwkl.

Note: If you find a translation service offering a better translation quality for a particular language, or a language not included in the above list, please inform us, and if the service is possible to be integrated, it will be.
"Man exists physically for the sole purpose to develop spiritually" -- let us all really remember this when we think what to do next.
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Yothu
Posts: 439
Joined: Sat Aug 14, 2004 11:46 am
Location: Europe
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Post: # 4315Post Yothu »

:applause: Applause, Applause

A fine idea! Very well done.

A lot of people here in Austria say they can or do not want to access a certain information, because it is in english.

I had the luck that my parents provided me profound education.

I've had a quick look into the german translation. As you mentioned; google-like. And I don't mean it as an offence. It is, however quite amusing. Like reading the german menu in an hungarian restaurant. :wink:

If you know what you're looking for and only have to grasp certain passages and phrases it can be very helpful though. Apart from that there's a very good online german-english translation tool available.
If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you always got.
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Robanan
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Post: # 4316Post Robanan »

I liked the idea Vesko, I can comment that the Italian translations turn out to be relatively good but the Russian translations are horrible and so far other English/Russian translation software that I know of are no better than the one made available by Promt.

Thank you Vesko, your efforts are appreciated :)
The essence of Consciousness, is the ability to Create, Process, Transmit and Receive Information Autonomously.
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bomohwkl
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Post: # 4318Post bomohwkl »

Woooww..The intergration is God-like fast! :lol:
VeskoP
Posts: 580
Joined: Mon Apr 05, 2004 8:10 pm

Post: # 4320Post VeskoP »

Thank you all! It seems there'll be good use for it.
I do not know what will happen, but I do hope that Google and other search engines will follow the translation links and suddenly the entire information on the forum will appear on the web in all those languages!

Yothu: it is valuable to get a confirmation from you that the German translation is acceptable! I was going to ask you :).

Robanan: Cool about the Italian translation! I know what you mean about the Russian translation; I know Russian, too. I have compared PROMT's system to (the former) Arsenal's SOCRAT, and also SYSTRANS' one. I have found PROMT to be ostensibly better than both, overall -- sometimes not. AltaVista Babel Fish uses SYSTRANS but it cannot be used without directing visitors to go to their web page, this holds for the Russian translation specifically (unless we violate their terms of use but we are not going to do that). We may need to provide it as an alternative, though, because I often see PROMT's service overloaded and getting slow response time or timeouts.

Bomo: Since Bomohwkl has ordered it, I knew I didn't have a chance to procrastinate! Also, I like the benefits that it provides -- that a significant number of people could benefit from it, especially if the search engines index the forum in all the languages :). We'll see in a couple of months -- I have read that Google, for example, puts newly created/appearing web pages in a buffer zone and they are not very visible within a couple of months following their creation.
Last edited by VeskoP on Fri Sep 02, 2005 8:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
"Man exists physically for the sole purpose to develop spiritually" -- let us all really remember this when we think what to do next.
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Aisin
Posts: 317
Joined: Mon Jan 03, 2005 6:36 am
Location: Malaysia

Post: # 4325Post Aisin »

Great! This is exciting. However, it may work better on European languages. Asian languages, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean, have very different sentence structure from English. And engines don't change the sentence structure, hence it may be abit difficult to 'decode' the sentences for readers. Anyhow, nothing is perfect, maybe one day there will be more intelligent tranlation engine with grammar translation & sentence restructuring. 8)
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