AutomaticTranslation

The idea is to build automatic translation capabilities into the wiki.

Fast and effective translation will help communities to discuss issues in different languages, but keep the discussion together.

Possibilities

I can write in whatever language. The page shows me all original text and all translated and corrected text, but it shows no pure machine translation. I can though request machine translation of any part of text to whatever language. After the machine translation I can correct this text. When I correct the text, it is a corrected translation and appears as such when the page is called up. If I don’t correct it does not. Superior are my selections of languages in my preferences.(Does this mean: The content I see is filtered by my selection of languages in my preferences?) I choose English and German, I do not choose Chinese. A Chinese-only speaker writes a page in Chinese. I see: there’s a new page in chinese, as I can’t read it, it does not interest me. A Chinese/English speaker reads it, thinks it’s good, and corrects the machine translation. I see: The Chinese page has been translated to English and now I can read it and - if I think it’s worth it - translate it to German. A German-only speaker could now read it and answer. I think it’s a good answer and translate it to English. The Chinese/English speaker thinks so as well and translates it to Chinese. Now the Chinese only speaker can read the German-only speaker’s answer. It is a little exciting to think this on a bigger scale, isn’t it?

Assisted Translating

Wiki pages could have a “translate” button that divides the page in two- a left half and a right half. On the left side, there would be the original text of the page, and on the right side, there could be an automatic translation, ready for easy editing.

There should be a way to start translating the text of the discussion at any place in the discussion.

Results can be divided by colour for easy reading. For example, original English could be black, German could be green, French could be brown. There should be filters for people who do not want to see translated text. For example, you could filter out German, but leave French.

For an example, see: http://no-smok.net/nsmk/MultiLingualCommunication, http://susning.nu/Multilingual

also: http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/MultiLingualWiki

Remote Translation

You don’t necessarily need to host language translation inside your WikiEngine. The engine could forward text to a translation server, and cache the results.

Partial Assisted Translation

You don’t necessarily need the computer to translate the entire text for you. That might take too much work on the part of wiki developers and maintainers. A smaller, more doable task, could be to get help translating a little bit at a time.

You might be able to integrate access to something like LookWAYUp into your WikiEngine. If, in the course of translating a word, you have difficulty, you could mark the text somehow. Then, when you look at the page preview, the WikiEngine gives you help with translating that text.

Implementations

As far as we know, no WikiEngine includes such a feature to date.