The Stack Exchange Translation Project

Question

I suggest adding a translate feature to SE sites, with something like a language selection drop-down menu on the page. The translation engine should default to Google Translate — which is often quite passable — and give users the option to contribute better translations. User-provided translations should go back to Google Translation memories.

This would help make SE sites multilingual, and make Google Translate — probably the best in town — even better.

Answer 1

This is, IMNSHO, a Really Bad Idea™.

As seen in the example given by @James Curran: if the dictionary/translator mangles even a simple, gramatically correct sentence, how will it fare in translating a typo-ridden, ambiguous, "plz send teh codez" text from Elbonian? My money would be on "crash and burn spectacularly" - the result will have an even lower SNR than the broken English we sometimes see here.

This is rooted in deeper, more abstract issue, which is only partially programming-related: Every once in a while (in the case of Stack Exchange, about three times a year, depending on the weather on the interblags), some programmer looks at a dictionary and thinks "hey, this translation thing should be easy - after all, everyone thinks in the same language, the languages just encode that, right?" Wrong. While that's a useful model of computer behavior (Turing-equivalence and all that), in stark contrast to programming languages, natural languages are not encodings of a universal brain-language, common to humanity.

The language is partially the medium, partially the message itself - thus, thinking in English will actually make you think in a different way than thinking in German or Polish or Japanese. This is one of the reasons why translation is hard - even in the simplest case of humans translating technical texts. Yes, there are tricks that make dictionary-based "translations" (like Google Translate's "transcribe words using a dictionary") sort-of work, and humans can - with effort - work out the meaning thereof, but the result won't be a translation, not by a long shot.

Just for a laugh, this is my second sentence, written in gramatically correct Czech (my native language), and then passed through the translator: "If the compiler and maim so simple sentence, how goes the full text hrubek, uncertainties and 'send-code-please' from elbonštiny?" The meaning is just about recognizable if you compare it with the version written in English, but almost unintelligible on its own - and that is from a gramatically correct input, from one Indo-european language to another.

Although this site is trying to be as user-friendly as possible, this proposal IMO wouldn't help - at best, it would shift the task of parsing out the meaning completely to the readers, with minimal help from the askers; at worst, it would actively lower the SNR by injecting meaningless gibberish (as it will mistranslate and/or give up on uncommon words; that's not to mention edit wars that tend to break out over side-by-side miltilingual content).

Please don't construe this as "English is the One True Language [of the Net]" or "questions must be gramatically perfect or perish" - I just think that SO cannot be, and shouldn't try to be, everything for everyone in every language which gives perfect results regardless of the user's effort. Being a great, English-language Q&A site for professional and enthusiast programmers is a large enough goal, without adding another layer of complexity - worse, a layer that has never worked right and probably won't in the predictable future.

Answer 2

There's an app for that. Actually not really, but you could make one using the API and a Greasemonkey script to integrate it.

Answer 3

I was actually just about to suggest something very similar.

I see the main problem here is not that people answering the question don't speak English, but that the people asking the questions don't speak English well.

I would like to suggest some new markup for the editor which says essentially, the following text is in this language. The text would then be passed to Google translate (or equalavent). For example:

%%Icelantic
The fljótur Brown stökk refsins yfir latur hundur.
%%

The messge displayed would then read like:

---

Automatic translation from Icelandic:

The quick Brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Original Icelandic text:

The fljótur Brown stökk refsins yfir latur hundur.

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