Hello @christoph and @F H Mughal

First of all we are very happy that this new tool is getting so much attention in this short time period.
But this is a tool from google so we do not have any direct influence on how it translates or which languages are added.

Google translator has a learning algorithm, so the more people use the editable translation function where you can type in sentences and translate them, the faster the translation algorithm learns. Over the past year or two the improvement between the translation between certain languages has been remarkable. We hope that google will add additional languages to this translation tool to open up the forum to an even larger audience.

Kind regards,
SuSanA secretariat.
[posted by Agazi Medhanie and Trevor Surridge]

Hi,
I just checked the discussion forum in French and selected English. I worked well for the translation of the text (the title is not so well translated but good enough to know what the post is about. I also tried from French to Portuguese but it just translated a couple of words here and there.
As far as the other categories are concerned (translation from English to French), it is brilliant, I think this is a major improvement to break the language barrier and to have access to information and experience !
Cecile

Could I request SuSanA secretariat for the inclusion of "Sindhi" language - Thanks

F H Mughal

Dear Christoph,
You mean you went to the French category in our forum and tried to translate it to English, i.e. this page:
forum.susana.org/forum/categories/44-for...ench-speaking-people
?

I think this needs a little more programming because the button is probably based on English as the base language but here it would need to be French as the base language.
I will ask Dotwerkstatt, our IT developers.

But for the English page it works brilliantly, don't you think? And it will only get better and better because Google Translate is continually improving.
Soon, many translaters will be out of jobs.

Elisabeth

Hello, I tried it out in German and Portuguese. It worked quite fine with the english part, but in the french part nothing (only the french to english works) what did I do wrong?

Christoph

Hello/Servus/Ciao/Bonjour

By public demand we added a new feature to our forum: see the new button on the top right which says "Select language" or the same in your language, if your computer has a different language than English (e.g. in my case it says "Sprache auswählen" in German). This feature is based on Google Translate. See here a screenshot of the language selection:






That will allow everybody to understand, answer, communicate and reply to any posts that
are already made or will be make in the future no matter in which language it is authored.

We hope that will help to destroy the barriers called "foreign language" and bring us closer together to discuss about the current topics.

Try the new feature and let us know if you find it useful or not.
We are thankful for any critics wheather they are positve or negative to make that forum more user friendly.

Long live Google Translate, what an amazing tool!

Kind regards,
SuSanA secretariat.
[posted by Agazi Medhanie]

I agree with Christoph - and the direction of this discussion in general. Although, I may be somewhat biased as English is my first language. However, google translate with a note in the english title about what the native language is would be my suggestion. This way at least the broader community can get an understanding of the post - google translate sometimes gets lost in translation. I also think this would save a lot of time from not having to have specific moderators for all languages.

Re: E-mail digest - If the title nomenclature remains in english with the native language in (brackets) and a google translate symbol or (translated by google) - This could be an adequate fix -

Cheers,

Steve

Hi / Bonjour,

"The respective moderators of the various language groups would be there to ensure that spam is not posted and to assist by inserting "google translations" where they have not been included".
Ok it is not a problem to do that. Then the moderator should receive an automatic message to be aware there's a new post and be able to translate soon after the post in the original language.

Google translation can be a good idea but as it was said before I agree it should be mentionned because it gives a good hint of what the post is about but it is not precise.

Best regards,
Cecile

Why don´t you integrate translate.google.com/manager/?hl=de, makes it easy for everybody without effort to translate it to their language (about 60 languages) but they continue to post in English. That makes everything easier…for those who would like to communicate with everybody and keep a separate space for other languages who want to communicate just in their language. The number of languages you mentioned sounds somewhat crazy to me….but perhaps it has its charm, but separated from the main forum.
That’s just my view.
Yours
Christoph

I tend to agree with Trevor, although this doesn't answer Christoph's concern about the way the digest (by e-mail) is set up. Would it help if the title of a post is also - as a matter of course - in English as well (instead of having the title only in the other language?).
E.g. this is how we do it in the SuSanA library where all non-English publications always have an English translation for the title as well. See e.g. here the Spanish publications:
www.susana.org/lang-en/library?showby=ye...ls=1&vbl_1=4&vbl_0=0

(the language can be selected on the right hand side of the library here: www.susana.org/library)

How many languages are we talking about? I guess it would be limited to English, French, Spanish, Portuguese (Chinese? Arabic? Russian? Swahili?).

Regards,
Elisabeth

Dear all

In order to network and share knowledge more widely and across language groups, I think that to divide the forum into isolated language silos is not going to lead to better information sharing and learning.

I propose that we open the forum up rather to multiple language groups.
In order to facilitate this proposition the following would need to be put in place:
1. moderators for each respective language
2. all posts should include an English translation below the post
3. replies (by people who do not speak the respective language) can be made in English with perhaps a translation inserted below the English post in the original language of the post
4. where google translator is used, it should be clearly stated (as google translator is good for giving an idea of the contents of the post, but not for a precise translation)

The respective moderators of the various language groups would be there to ensure that spam is not posted and to assist by inserting "google translations" where they have not been included.

What are you thoughts on this proposition?

Rgds
Trevor

First of all my apologies I did not notice it is the french section. I will continue in English as I don´t speak French.
second. I think it would be important to have a possibility to distinguish between English and French section. The digest comes all mixed up an the recent topics as well. It gets a mess if more people write in other languages (spanish). Maybe there would be a possibility to exclude the topics from the French section (if one ticks a box?)

Tout d'abord mes excuses je n'ai pas remarqué qu'il est la section française. Je vais continuer en anglais parce que je ne parle pas français.
secondes. Je pense qu'il serait important d'avoir la possibilité de faire la distinction entre l'article anglais et en français. Le résumé est tout mélangé un des sujets les dernières ainsi. Cela devient un gâchis si plus de gens écrivent dans d'autres langues (espagnol). Peut-être il y aurait une possibilité d'exclure les sujets de la section française (si l'on ticks une boîte?)

Regards
Christoph