Is automatic translation possible?

[kyle246]

I have a wordpress/buddypress website.

Recently, a French guy, with a good sized subscriber base on YouTube messaged me and he wants his French speaking users to contribute and interact on my website.

I was wondering if it is possible to have automatic translation. I found a plugin (WP-Translate) that translates the entire page into any language, but if a person makes a post in French, it would stay in French and not go into the default language of English if an English speaker was viewing the page.

Is there anyway for French people to make posts in French and have that be viewable in English for the English speakers and vice-versa?

My website is a social network type website so I was wondering if this was possible?

Thanks,
Kyle

[dgswilson]

I guess for on the fly - some loacation detection - then if france serve this - but I don't know of any.

Maybe:

http://www.javascriptkit.com/
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/
http://www.perlscriptsjavascripts.com/

translate demo:

http://img.labnol.org/files/translation.html

[a53mp]

Anything is possible.. but what you want is not possible.. what you want is understandable and readable. If you do it automatically it will most likely screw up the language or sentence structure where people will know that it's not right and will affect your site. It might be better to let them post as is, but have a Google translate or other translate button on the page itself and give the reader the option to have it translated

[ep2012]

From the point of view of a surfer (me), I absolutely detest sites that think they know better than me what I want to see & how I want to see it, & that includes Google where they ONLY give you search results based on your IP address b/c somehow it's logical that you are ONLY looking for retail in your area - NOT! It's becoming worse & worse every year.

So what does this have to do with language you ask? Well I now live in a country in Central America & nothing irks me more when I go visit a site that's no from this country (it's a US country or it's a site that's supposed to be in English, & instead it's in Spanish & I can't read a thing.

If they made the word "English" prominent or put the US or UK flag prominent, fine, but they DON'T. I just gave blank to a company that was totally dense & said it's there & then after arguing with them, they gave me instructions on how to find it. Somehow I'm supposed to know to do ALL that (several steps) in a language I can't understand. Talk about brainless & I can guarantee they won't fix a thing.

Like I said, it's becoming worse & worse. These site owners are clueless & don't take into account that maybe not everyone from that IP address speaks that language. I applaud their efforts in trying to make the site usable in other countries, but let the surfer decide what language they want it in, don't force them. How difficult is it to put a bunch of flags up there in the 5 most popular languages. Everyone knows the flag of their language.

Food for thought when you are making your decision & sorry for the rant, but it just wastes my time & the company loses my biz too which they don't seem to care about.




Michelle

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Is there anyway for French people to make posts in French and have that be viewable in English for the English speakers and vice-versa?

I don't think you will find anything out of the box that will do this. You'd probably have to have some extensive custom background programming done to get it to work.

Why are you adjusting to suit one crowd of people? If you are going to do this for French then the next request will be from another non English speaking group asking how come...

If you see a huge potential making your site multi lingual, go for it. But I'd think about all the other non English readers also.

[sytemaker]

Anything is possible.. but what you want is not possible.. what you want is understandable and readable. If you do it automatically it will most likely screw up the language or sentence structure where people will know that it's not right and will affect your site. It might be better to let them post as is, but have a Google translate or other translate button on the page itself and give the reader the option to have it translated

I have to agree with the above statement entirely. I have yet to come across a translation software tool that's any good. Without exception any of them (that I have experienced) don't do the job properly and end up presenting you with translations that are laughable at best and totally nonsensical at worst. I'm afraid translating languages is still a job that needs to be done by mere humans and I can't see that change in a hurry.

[NetProwler]

If it is your own editorial content, it makes sense to translate the content using suitably qualified people to do the translation. For user generated content - as in your case, machine translation using the widget you have in mind - may not be the right way to do. Machine translation is pathetic most of the times. Subtle nuances of a language is lost and leaves your readers disillusioned and makes a bad impression about your site.

It is always a good policy to check for correct spellings, proper punctuations and grammatically correct sentences in the editorial content. Trying to do that in other languages without native speakers of the language is not possible.

For a client's site targeting Pan-European audiences, we ended up spending more on translation than what we spent creating the content in English.

[SENtelligence]

Automatic translation provides a poor user experience, because each language has a unique semantic structure and grammar.
Does your site really target French users? If it does, you could set up a separate section for those guys. For example, you could call it "other languages" or "international" or "[site name] in French".

[chillax]

Hi There

Well, if you wish to have the post translated automatically on-the-fly when an "english" visitor is viewing your site; then I am not sure if it can be done.

However there is a plugin for Wordpress that adds the ability to translate your site on-the-fly using Google translate. You just have to add the desired language from Admin Panel and it appears in a drop-down on frontend.

The good part? While all posts are dynamically translated, the plugin gives you an option to provide your own translations for the phrases you think the translation was not right.

Heres a small demo:

ramantest.label-a.com

The language selector is at the bottom.

The plugin's name is: Transposh Translation Filter
Their website:

http://transposh.org

To see live editing of translations, go to their site, check the box "edit translations" and click on some language other than english.

Hope this helps

[JetKor]

Hi Kyle,

1. Automatic translation provides a poor user experience most of the times since semantic
structure and grammar are unique for most of the languages.
2. I suggest you create a Google translate or other translate button on the page itself. This provides
site visitors an option to translate.
3. Trying doing it automatically may result in worsening the sentence or language.
4. There are a few plugins available that translates the entire page into any language. However, most
of the plugins will not serve your purpose since they do not default to English if the post is made in
some other language.

Hope the above points answered the question.

Thanks,
JetKor