How about a Translation feature?

One of the more pronounced effects of the open registration since 6/6 is that I'm running into a lot more non-English speaking people lately than I ever have before. Most of them have pretty decent command of English and we communicate fine (albeit a little awkwardly), but then I got to thinking ...

The other night I was in a room with 2 Brazilians who were speaking Portugese only. I was curious as to what they were saying so I opened Babelfish on my other PC and tried to type their chat into that to translate. It made me wish for a translation feature in SL -- even if it's just a web window to Babelfish. I couldn't even begin to translate the Norwegian and Swedish sentences I've seen, with all the special characters (ø,å).

Wouldn't it be a great way to lower some of the bars that separate residents linguistically if Second Life had a seamless way to translate chat between major languages?

I support this feature, especially if it will help me understand when some child comes up and says "y0 d00d th1s 5h1zZ47 R0Xx0rzZ!!!!!11"

It can be done!

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/leet.php

Oh wow, you are right Cindy ... it translated as ...

"Greetings and salutations my fair lady! I must say, this is absolutely incredible!"

I agree from a non-English speaker's point of view, though I don't think it should be placed too high on their priority list. There seem to be so many more pressing issues

When I go out with my friends from my contry, we try not to chat in our language too much in crowded places as we don't want to annoy people. We've encountered so many people who get miffed by our speaking in a language they don't understand, although the vast majority just get curious and ask what language we are talking in, which often leads to pleasant conversations about their trips to Japan and such. But what do we do when people suddenly TP near us and demand us to speak in English "like everyone else" or "cut the asian crap"? I often can't help snapping at them just to feel bad afterwards. Some even do that in our own sim and we've been thrown at more and more of such intolerance lately.

Perhaps they are afraid if we may be speaking ill of them? Dunno but if such a feature was introduced, there will be less misunderstanding for sure. Plus we have dear friends from the U.S. and Canada who love to hang with us. They'd kill to have such a feature.

It's called "xenophobia" Chie, I'm sorry to say. I recommend you just ignore them and pretend you don't understand what they're saying - there's no way to make them feel ashamed for being so rude.


I think if I had this, I'd go to Japanese and Scandanavian sims just to use it

People tend to be nervous of things they don't understand, even a language being spoken about ppl who could care less. I would just ignore them and do as you feel is comfortable.
Regardless of what anyone says, it shows alot of empathy as well as understanding on your side and your friends to speak english when in public.
But I do not think you should feel pressured to in any way. If they don't like it, tell em to piss off...

I'd very much like to see this as well - although I agree with Chie's perspective on priority.

It'd be nice if we could just do this ourselves with some nifty HTTPRequest() manipulation to an existing machine translation site. Unfortunately, the HTTP throttle would make this near useless for live chat.

At the Shelter, we've noticed a huge increase of Dutch & German speakers in the mornings, and Spanish & Portuguese speakers in the later evenings. I just wish I could give them a proper welcome, in a language they can understand.

I've made myself a 'translation' notecard of common phrases I say, like "Welcome to SL" or "Freebies are on the Table" or "No Worries". One new resident has even taken it upon herself to translate a bunch of the help notecards we pass out into French for us

For now, I've become somewhat of a pro in pasting back & forth manually in Babelfish to have a conversation. It seems to work great for Dutch & German - not so great for Portuguese and Spanish... and French... ... I shudder to think of what I'm actually saying after its run through machine translation

**falls off chair laughing**

Wow, Travis, any way I could get a copy of that notecard? I have 2 notecard vendors set up - one with landmarks to freebie sites (thank you Wildefire) and one with advice on how to make money. If you want, I'll swap you

I'm amazed nobody created an SL translator service yet. With 50% of all new residents being foreign, and a lot of people looking for a way to make some L$, it shouldn't be that hard to make this into a viable SL business

There reason that there WON'T be a translator is because there's no such thing as an effective machine translation yet. I have seen machine translation tools that give a reasonable translation. They are almost as resource-intensive as SL itself.

Why use machines, if you have 300,000 human residents?

Well, you can sort of hack the SL Help and make it point to Babel fish for an example, using the tutorial Hamlet himself posted a while ago.
Unfortunely every time you enter a different page there´s no other way to snap back yet.

Hey Travis, if you ever need some someone to translate portuguese to english at the Shelter, feel free to drop me a message.

Come on scripters, we have httprequest, there are translation software suites and free translation pages you can piggyback onto. Write some translation devices. I wrote one back when email was pretty much the only in and out. Aside from getting itself blacklisted frequently it worked fine. I'm too damn lazy to do it again, but it can be done. It could even include leetspeak translations .

It's nice to see lots of internationals coming in. I agree with the poster who said machine translation stinks. I am part of a group of people who have found a nice and fair way to communicate, using an easy to learn, neutral language: Esperanto. I encourage others to look into it. You can learn enough to communicate on a wide variety of topics in a fraction of the time it would take to learn how to do so in even just one other language, much less the dozens of languages represented in SL's population.

Speaking both as that original poster who said machine translation stinks, and as a one-time very active member of an artificial languages community, I have to say that I7d rather have machine translation than Esperanto.

Esperanto is so blatantly based not only on Polish, but on the inventor's specific dialect of Polish, that it isn't even funny.

I see, Instead of gaining instant (albiet flawed) Machine translation so you can speak to someone on Line, you ask them in sign language (??) to wait a semester while you go out and take a course in a language Neither of you Understand so now you Can't understand what they are saying to you in two languages instead of just one.

For now, Use Babelfish (Slow, but effective) and Push for LL to either develope their own Translator, or establish an In Game Link to one already in use.

Angel.

Get LL to remove the HTTP throttle and I will write one and make it freely available.

At the moment trying to HTTP a conversation will hit your user limit too quickly - ( what is it now 10-20 requests in 100 seconds ? )