Babelfish

Not sure, I thought Babelfish (yahoo or altavista) were automatic, not collaborative networking powered. Can you please be more specific?

how do you create enough momentum (without loads of content this site is not interesting).
Tommy
besides that there are other business websites on the web where you can rate business partners.
Tommy

Thanks for your comment vanhees!

Pretty good idea. One emerging market is online businesses that want to market to other countries. They all need their websites translated. Many are using Google's site translator, but it's a joke!

Actually, one of my client's right now wants us to add Spanish and German content on his site (he's a hair loss restoration doc, and gets clients from Germany that fly in for a vacation and a new head of hair while they are relaxing in the beach condo) We're trying to find someone to translate his site for him! This idea would solve that problem!

This is sort of like Yahoo Answers, but for translation services.

Hi,

This idea has many similarities to,

Culturefish's Idea: "Crowd Sourced Translation Service"

Your idea may compliment that of Culture Fish, since he appears to be focusing on China, short term?

Quote: "The text is sliced into sentences and put into a database. The users pick up the sentences and translate. The owner can approve or ask for further translation. The translator gets scores and feedbacks which contributes to his popularity."

In my opinion, translating sentences will only work some of the time.
A lot of business documents contain, information of a technical nature which cannot be translated "verbatim", it would be necessary in quite a lot of instances that the translator understand the complete concept. This could require the translation of many paragraphs of technical data by one or more specialized translators.

The owner will in most cases not understand the Language into which his document has been translated, so how can he approve it?
This is not game, you must stand by your translation. For instance if you were to give me an incorrect translation, my first reaction would be to fire you, my second would be to sue you for any damages or loss of business caused .

Good Luck

Hello CharonV, thanks for your good feedback, I give you my answers below:

In my opinion, translating sentences will only work some of the time.
A lot of business documents....

In the demo you can see that the whole paragraph can be viewed in one click, and it is up to the translator to read the context and decide to translate the whole.
Putting sentenses in the database lets have a large bin where to perform searches for similar sentences. It happens that companies documentation uses always the same sentences in different documents, the service could propose back them if found.

The owner will in most cases not understand the Language into which his document has been translated, so how can he approve it?....

Usually in large companies they send to translators for translation and one subsidiary local mother thongue reviews for approval, most of these multinational companies have this as a policy to be sure that one employ from the company approves the translated text. This leads to several back and forth from translator headquarter and subsidiary, I tell you cause I experienced in my previous job positions.

CharonV,

there is also another possibility, the sentence is rejected cause translated by a low feedback user, it is the requester right to ask for best translation, it is translator's right to have a try even if with poor feedback profile! Democracy may be?

Although the machine translation of BABELFISH is rudimentary, it is cheap and transalation services can have a fairly high price depending on the language being translated. AND you are asking for a high demand service to be spread over a number of translators.

Coordination will be the key to a successful (and hopefully, profitable) implementation of this idea.

Having a good rank in small quick free translation allows freelance translators to get popular and engaged in big projects!

Yes... but wouldn't freelance translators liked to get paid? Translators should be highly skilled in what they do and those that do it PERFECTLY should be paid accordingly i.e. VERY WELL.

> The text is sliced into sentences and put into a database (Why? cause recurring sentences can be compared and proposed)

This is already done by copmputer aided translation ("translation memory")

> The owner can approve

As already stated the owner often can't evaluate the translation.

> The translator gets scores

> sliced sentences. The translator gets payed the translated sentence amount.

This is nonsensical for most text, as proper translation implies to map the meaning (not word-to-word nor even sentence-for-sentence) while adapting (with no distortion!) for target culture.

> The community will rate each translation and translator.

Anonymous rating has no value. Some, for example, will create many fake customers accounts which will praise their professional account.

natmaka,

computer aided is not this case

read the answers you will find how the translation is rated for instance in big companies

moreover as already said the whole text can be reviewed in one click

what you say as last, could be applied also to this site cambrianhouseand an d others (why ebay does works with feedbacks system?), you could have fake accounts and rate yourself, this is against any collaborative network. The larger the number of contributors the higher is the quality of the information, see wikipedia.

> what you say as last, could be applied also to this site cambrianhouseand an d others

I agree, but in turn this doesn't alleviates the problem for your project

> (why ebay does works with feedbacks system?)

It is full of exploited holes

> The larger the number of contributors the higher is the quality of the information, see wikipedia.

Intrinsically neutral articles (sci, tech...) are often pretty good but on nearly every controversy, Wikipedia is full of propaganda. Written by a some camp or the other one.

Take a glance, for example, at [url=http://www.makarevit...l.html#wp]this[/url] .

Don't forget that many authorities simply (professors...) ban Wikipedia and that everyone agrees upon the fact that it cannot be a single source of any serious work.

Quality vs quantity is an old debate (and the "infinite monkey theorem" implies... well... infinite time)

http://www1.worldlingo.com/en/mywl/
http://translation2.paralink.com/
http://www.reverso.n...nslation.asp?lang=EN

how is this idea any better than these services?

tlyden,

1st you must pay and it seems to be computer translation
2nd is computer translation NOT human
3rd same as before

what I propose is a made by HUMANS translation

namatka,

what are you doing ina social collaboration website if you do not believe on it?
If I apply your thoughts to the rating of this site for ideas, the conclusion is that it has no value.
I do not get your negative attitude on social websites

> what are you doing ina social collaboration website if you do not believe on it?

The problems can be fixed, see there: http://www.cambrianh...er/ideas-id/DzlIVZ1/

> If I apply your thoughts to the rating of this site for ideas, the conclusion is that it has no value.

You are right. And I don't write it because I'm disgruntled: WebDSign won an Idearwarz. This site is interesting for many things, but IMHO not for the voting system, which is so easy to cheat (some already did it).

> negative attitude

A clear answer to my doubt, or a demonstration of the fact that your idea alleviates them, is more convincing to me than some Mccarthyism. For now, it's 1/5

It's a nice idea if it works, but I think it's in danger of going down the same route as Amazon's mTurk (which can also be used for translation, though I agree a dedicated translation website has its advantages). There, the amount of money people are willing to pay for services is completely disproportionate to the amount of work required - as in, I'll pay you 10 cents for half an hour's work.

At the root of the problem is the fact that crowdsourcing work MUST be cheaper than getting it done professionally, otherwise it's not an attractive option. At the same time it must be (at least nearly) as good as getting it done professionally, otherwise it's not an attractive option! Persuading people to work cheaply enough and pay well enough is always going to be a challenge...