Second Life Forums Archive - Google Translator Toolkit

SuezanneC Baskerville

Forums Rock!

Join date: 22 Dec 2003

Posts: 14,229

06-13-2009 13:48

Those of us (not me) who are involved in translating SL documentation into various languages might want to take a look at the Google Translator Toolkit.

The url is
http://translate.google.com/toolkit

I'm monolingual (at best) and so can't really test it out.

_____________________

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So long to these forums, the vBulletin forums that used to be at forums.secondlife.com. I will miss them.

I can be found on the web by searching for "SuezanneC Baskerville", or go to

http://www.google.com/profiles/suezanne

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http://lindenlab.tribe.net/ created on 11/19/03.

Members: Ben, Catherine, Colin, Cory, Dan, Doug, Jim, Philip, Phoenix, Richard,
Robin, and Ryan

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Peter Stindberg

Registered User

Join date: 10 Oct 2006

Posts: 18

This is no alternative

06-14-2009 00:32

While automatic translation certainly has reached impressive results by now, it still is far from perfect and natural sounding texts. Even institutions like the EU or UN, who pay millions into research for automatic translation, do not have reached a level yet where one would not know a text has been translated automatically.

I run "Babel Transations", the oldest SL translation agency, and we often get auto-translated texts with the request to correct them. There is no alternative to a text translated by a skilled human. And with prices starting from 2L$/word there is really no reason to not use a SL translation agency.

SuezanneC Baskerville

Forums Rock!

Join date: 22 Dec 2003

Posts: 14,229

06-14-2009 01:24

This is not the standard Google Language tools machine translation that's been around for years, it is a new system designed to help groups of human translators work together to create human generated translations.

Watch the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7W2NJFdoIg

Some of the SL users working on translating the wiki documentation as described at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Community_Translation_Project really ought to give it a try.

All that can be lost is a bit of time.

Incidentally, the phrase "do not have reached a level yet" is not correct English; it would be better written as "have not yet reached a level" or "have not reached a level" or any number of other possible alternate wordings.

_____________________

-

So long to these forums, the vBulletin forums that used to be at forums.secondlife.com. I will miss them.

I can be found on the web by searching for "SuezanneC Baskerville", or go to

http://www.google.com/profiles/suezanne

-

http://lindenlab.tribe.net/ created on 11/19/03.

Members: Ben, Catherine, Colin, Cory, Dan, Doug, Jim, Philip, Phoenix, Richard,
Robin, and Ryan

-

Pserendipity Daniels

Assume sarcasm as default

Join date: 21 Dec 2006

Posts: 8,839

06-14-2009 02:14

I am, of course, available to attempt to translate most posters' "English" into something more comprehensible.

Pep (At reasonable rates - except for Jumpy's scat.)

_____________________

Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!

SuezanneC Baskerville

Forums Rock!

Join date: 22 Dec 2003

Posts: 14,229

06-14-2009 02:29

Actually, a monolingual person could play a part in the translation process, serving as a conventional editor for the passages already translated by the bilingual members of the translation group.

_____________________

-

So long to these forums, the vBulletin forums that used to be at forums.secondlife.com. I will miss them.

I can be found on the web by searching for "SuezanneC Baskerville", or go to

http://www.google.com/profiles/suezanne

-

http://lindenlab.tribe.net/ created on 11/19/03.

Members: Ben, Catherine, Colin, Cory, Dan, Doug, Jim, Philip, Phoenix, Richard,
Robin, and Ryan

-

DancesWithRobots Soyer

Registered User

Join date: 7 Apr 2006

Posts: 701

06-14-2009 07:25

One wonders if we're still offering russians strong vodka and rotten meat.

_____________________

"Two lives I have.
One life I live. One life I dream.
In dreams I remember the better in me."

SuezanneC Baskerville

Forums Rock!

Join date: 22 Dec 2003

Posts: 14,229

06-14-2009 08:09

Some excerpts f-r-o-m the documentation

From: someone

Translator Toolkit basics
Google Translator Toolkit basics
Print

Google Translator Toolkit is part of our effort to make information universally accessible through translation. Google Translator Toolkit helps translators translate better and more quickly through one shared, innovative translation technology.

Here's what you can do with Google Translator Toolkit:

* Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML, text, Wikipedia articles and knols.
* Use previous human translations and machine translation to 'pretranslate' your uploaded documents.
* Use our simple WYSIWYG editor to improve the pretranslation.
* Invite others (by email) to edit or view your translations.
* Edit documents online with whomever you ch-oose.
* Download documents to your desktop in their native formats --- Word, OpenOffice, RTF or HTML.
* Publish your Wikipedia and knol translations back to Wikipedia or Knol.

How is this different f-r-o-m Google Translate? Google Translate provides ¡®automatic translations¡¯ produced purely by technology, without intervention f-r-o-m human translators. In contrast, Google Translator Toolkit allows human translators to work faster and more accurately, aided by technologies like Google Translate.

From: someone

Languages
Print

All documents in Google Translator Toolkit must have a source and target language:

* The source language is the original language of the document, before any translation.
* The target language is the language into which you're translating the document.

Google Translator Toolkit doesn't support translations of single documents written in multiple languages. But you can split files into documents of one language each and submit them individually.

For now, Google Translator Toolkit supports the following languages:

* Source languages: English
* Target languages: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Maltese, Marathi, Norwegian (Bokmal), Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese

From: someone

Using translation memories
Print
A translation memory (TM) is a database of human translations. As you translate new sentences, we automatically search all available translation memories for previous translations similar to your new sentence. If such sentences exist, we rank and then show them to you. Comparing your translation to previous human translations improves consistency and saves you time: you can reuse previous translations or adjust them to create new, more contextually appropriate translations. When you finish translating documents in Google Translator Toolkit, we save your translations to a translation memory so you or other translators can avoid duplicating work.

By default, we save your translations to a shared, publicly searchable translation memory. By contributing your translations to this public translation memory, you help other users bring content more quickly into your language.

Primary translation memories
Some translators, may not want to save their translations to a publicly searchable translation memory. In such cases, you can associate a translation memory with a translation by following these steps:
1. When creating a new translation, click Sharing.

Sharing
2. Type the name of the translation memory where you want to save the translations. If you have no access to translation memories, you can create a new translation memory.
3. Click Save.

If you make a mistake and need to add or change the TM associated with an incomplete translation, you can change the TM association by following these steps:

1. Open the translation in the translation edit page.
2. f-r-o-m the Edit drop-down, click Edit properties.
3. s-e-l-e-c-t the translation memory where you want to save the translations. If you have no access to translation memories, you can create a new translation memory.
4. Click OK.

Note that custom translation memories are not supported for Wikipedia and Knol. Since content in those sites are meant to be shared and published, translators can only save Wikipedia and Knol translations to our global, shared TM.

Search ranking and translation memories
We search and rank translations as follows:

All else being equal, primary TM search results trump collaborative TM search results. Similarly, collaborative TM search results trump general TM results.

If a translation has an associated, primary TM, we search that TM first for previous translations of your sentences.
If we don't have enough relevant results f-r-o-m the primary TM, we search all TMs to which you have access through collaboration.
If we still don't have enough relevant results f-r-o-m the primary and collaborative TMs, we search the general, shared TM.

Apparently the only source language at this point is English, which is a bit disappointing to me personally, since I want things translated into English, such as the Novoking and uWorld documentation translated f-r-o-m Chinese into English, and the Meet-Me documents translated f-r-o-m Japanese into English.

However, for Second Life, the source language being limited to English is not so bad. There's tons of documentation already written in English, and a multi-lingual world that needs and or wants documents in their native or preferred tongue.

Even if it doesn't work out to allow this tool to be used as a direct part of Linden Lab's translation efforts, folks with products that require instructions in order to appeal to customers might want to investigate this free service and see if it can help their hired or volunteer translators work more effectively and efficiently.

_____________________

-

So long to these forums, the vBulletin forums that used to be at forums.secondlife.com. I will miss them.

I can be found on the web by searching for "SuezanneC Baskerville", or go to

http://www.google.com/profiles/suezanne

-

http://lindenlab.tribe.net/ created on 11/19/03.

Members: Ben, Catherine, Colin, Cory, Dan, Doug, Jim, Philip, Phoenix, Richard,
Robin, and Ryan

-

Google Translator Toolkit
SuezanneC Baskerville Forums Rock! Join date: 22 Dec 2003 Posts: 14,229	06-13-2009 13:48 Those of us (not me) who are involved in translating SL documentation into various languages might want to take a look at the Google Translator Toolkit. The url is http://translate.google.com/toolkit I'm monolingual (at best) and so can't really test it out. _____________________ - So long to these forums, the vBulletin forums that used to be at forums.secondlife.com. I will miss them. I can be found on the web by searching for "SuezanneC Baskerville", or go to http://www.google.com/profiles/suezanne - http://lindenlab.tribe.net/ created on 11/19/03. Members: Ben, Catherine, Colin, Cory, Dan, Doug, Jim, Philip, Phoenix, Richard, Robin, and Ryan -
Peter Stindberg Registered User Join date: 10 Oct 2006 Posts: 18	This is no alternative 06-14-2009 00:32 While automatic translation certainly has reached impressive results by now, it still is far from perfect and natural sounding texts. Even institutions like the EU or UN, who pay millions into research for automatic translation, do not have reached a level yet where one would not know a text has been translated automatically. I run "Babel Transations", the oldest SL translation agency, and we often get auto-translated texts with the request to correct them. There is no alternative to a text translated by a skilled human. And with prices starting from 2L$/word there is really no reason to not use a SL translation agency.
SuezanneC Baskerville Forums Rock! Join date: 22 Dec 2003 Posts: 14,229	06-14-2009 01:24 This is not the standard Google Language tools machine translation that's been around for years, it is a new system designed to help groups of human translators work together to create human generated translations. Watch the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7W2NJFdoIg Some of the SL users working on translating the wiki documentation as described at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Community_Translation_Project really ought to give it a try. All that can be lost is a bit of time. Incidentally, the phrase "do not have reached a level yet" is not correct English; it would be better written as "have not yet reached a level" or "have not reached a level" or any number of other possible alternate wordings. _____________________ - So long to these forums, the vBulletin forums that used to be at forums.secondlife.com. I will miss them. I can be found on the web by searching for "SuezanneC Baskerville", or go to http://www.google.com/profiles/suezanne - http://lindenlab.tribe.net/ created on 11/19/03. Members: Ben, Catherine, Colin, Cory, Dan, Doug, Jim, Philip, Phoenix, Richard, Robin, and Ryan -
Pserendipity Daniels Assume sarcasm as default Join date: 21 Dec 2006 Posts: 8,839	06-14-2009 02:14 I am, of course, available to attempt to translate most posters' "English" into something more comprehensible. Pep (At reasonable rates - except for Jumpy's scat.) _____________________ Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!
SuezanneC Baskerville Forums Rock! Join date: 22 Dec 2003 Posts: 14,229	06-14-2009 02:29 Actually, a monolingual person could play a part in the translation process, serving as a conventional editor for the passages already translated by the bilingual members of the translation group. _____________________ - So long to these forums, the vBulletin forums that used to be at forums.secondlife.com. I will miss them. I can be found on the web by searching for "SuezanneC Baskerville", or go to http://www.google.com/profiles/suezanne - http://lindenlab.tribe.net/ created on 11/19/03. Members: Ben, Catherine, Colin, Cory, Dan, Doug, Jim, Philip, Phoenix, Richard, Robin, and Ryan -
DancesWithRobots Soyer Registered User Join date: 7 Apr 2006 Posts: 701	06-14-2009 07:25 One wonders if we're still offering russians strong vodka and rotten meat. _____________________ "Two lives I have. One life I live. One life I dream. In dreams I remember the better in me."
SuezanneC Baskerville Forums Rock! Join date: 22 Dec 2003 Posts: 14,229	06-14-2009 08:09 Some excerpts f-r-o-m the documentation From: someone Translator Toolkit basics Google Translator Toolkit basics Print Google Translator Toolkit is part of our effort to make information universally accessible through translation. Google Translator Toolkit helps translators translate better and more quickly through one shared, innovative translation technology. Here's what you can do with Google Translator Toolkit: * Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML, text, Wikipedia articles and knols. * Use previous human translations and machine translation to 'pretranslate' your uploaded documents. * Use our simple WYSIWYG editor to improve the pretranslation. * Invite others (by email) to edit or view your translations. * Edit documents online with whomever you ch-oose. * Download documents to your desktop in their native formats --- Word, OpenOffice, RTF or HTML. * Publish your Wikipedia and knol translations back to Wikipedia or Knol. How is this different f-r-o-m Google Translate? Google Translate provides ¡®automatic translations¡¯ produced purely by technology, without intervention f-r-o-m human translators. In contrast, Google Translator Toolkit allows human translators to work faster and more accurately, aided by technologies like Google Translate. From: someone Languages Print All documents in Google Translator Toolkit must have a source and target language: * The source language is the original language of the document, before any translation. * The target language is the language into which you're translating the document. Google Translator Toolkit doesn't support translations of single documents written in multiple languages. But you can split files into documents of one language each and submit them individually. For now, Google Translator Toolkit supports the following languages: * Source languages: English * Target languages: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Maltese, Marathi, Norwegian (Bokmal), Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese From: someone Using translation memories Print A translation memory (TM) is a database of human translations. As you translate new sentences, we automatically search all available translation memories for previous translations similar to your new sentence. If such sentences exist, we rank and then show them to you. Comparing your translation to previous human translations improves consistency and saves you time: you can reuse previous translations or adjust them to create new, more contextually appropriate translations. When you finish translating documents in Google Translator Toolkit, we save your translations to a translation memory so you or other translators can avoid duplicating work. By default, we save your translations to a shared, publicly searchable translation memory. By contributing your translations to this public translation memory, you help other users bring content more quickly into your language. Primary translation memories Some translators, may not want to save their translations to a publicly searchable translation memory. In such cases, you can associate a translation memory with a translation by following these steps: 1. When creating a new translation, click Sharing. Sharing 2. Type the name of the translation memory where you want to save the translations. If you have no access to translation memories, you can create a new translation memory. 3. Click Save. If you make a mistake and need to add or change the TM associated with an incomplete translation, you can change the TM association by following these steps: 1. Open the translation in the translation edit page. 2. f-r-o-m the Edit drop-down, click Edit properties. 3. s-e-l-e-c-t the translation memory where you want to save the translations. If you have no access to translation memories, you can create a new translation memory. 4. Click OK. Note that custom translation memories are not supported for Wikipedia and Knol. Since content in those sites are meant to be shared and published, translators can only save Wikipedia and Knol translations to our global, shared TM. Search ranking and translation memories We search and rank translations as follows: All else being equal, primary TM search results trump collaborative TM search results. Similarly, collaborative TM search results trump general TM results. If a translation has an associated, primary TM, we search that TM first for previous translations of your sentences. If we don't have enough relevant results f-r-o-m the primary TM, we search all TMs to which you have access through collaboration. If we still don't have enough relevant results f-r-o-m the primary and collaborative TMs, we search the general, shared TM. Apparently the only source language at this point is English, which is a bit disappointing to me personally, since I want things translated into English, such as the Novoking and uWorld documentation translated f-r-o-m Chinese into English, and the Meet-Me documents translated f-r-o-m Japanese into English. However, for Second Life, the source language being limited to English is not so bad. There's tons of documentation already written in English, and a multi-lingual world that needs and or wants documents in their native or preferred tongue. Even if it doesn't work out to allow this tool to be used as a direct part of Linden Lab's translation efforts, folks with products that require instructions in order to appeal to customers might want to investigate this free service and see if it can help their hired or volunteer translators work more effectively and efficiently. _____________________ - So long to these forums, the vBulletin forums that used to be at forums.secondlife.com. I will miss them. I can be found on the web by searching for "SuezanneC Baskerville", or go to http://www.google.com/profiles/suezanne - http://lindenlab.tribe.net/ created on 11/19/03. Members: Ben, Catherine, Colin, Cory, Dan, Doug, Jim, Philip, Phoenix, Richard, Robin, and Ryan -

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