What would you do???

Hi Here is the situation...

I am a designer and receive Ims regarding compliments or issues (lately not receiving an item.. sl bug:/). But the problem I have is I received an IM in another language and have no idea what it says.

I don't want to ignore it as I believe in good customer service and I IMed the person back and said I only speak English and have received a reply back. And with SL lately not sure they got it.

I would very much like to know what the IM said. Is there anywhere that you know I could go where someone can tell me what it says? Or back to the title of this thread... What would you do if it happened to you?

Thanks Za

(sorry for all the I's LOL)

You didn't say what language it was in!

Personally, I'd try and find out how to tell the person that you don't speak their language, in their language.

I would go to Babelfish and translate the text. If you're not sure of the language, you can try it in several different ones.



I know there are also tools inworld that will translate for you, but I keep crashing out tonight so I can't check on it. Try doing a search for 'translate'... if you can stay logged in long enough to do it.

If you know what lanuage it is try this http://babelfish.altavista.com/

Another vote for Babelfish here - works fine for me

Thank you Everyone I'm not sure if its French or not. A few words look like Spanish but the majority doesn't LOL but I will try the Bable site... tks again!!

After having some problems with Babelfish not handling something simple, I tried:

Google Translate

and found it to be better.

Another vote for google languages. I use it all the time, and with my limited knowledge of German I can tell the translation is doing a good attempt at matching up case and grammar as well.

If you're not sure about the language of an IM, may I suggest you this free tool:

http://www.appliedlanguage.com/language_identifier.shtml

You'll need at least a sentence of 5 words for a more than reliable answer...Enjoy!

Thanks again Everyone... Bable wasn't much help so will try the other options.

Try Portuguese and Italian.

lee

If babelfish and google translate don't get you very far, try simply replying in English, stating "Sorry, I only speak English". Most of the stuff for SL is in English, and they most likely have at least *some* ability in English, or they wouldn't be here...

An interesting observation: When most people hear/read something in a language they are unfamiliar with, they often are very ready to ascribe it to being a specific language that they themselves are unfamiliar with. For example, someone who speaks no French might think it's French, while someone who does speak French might think it's Portugese... If you don't at least recognize part of what a language is, then guessing what language to try to translate it from is actually very tricky!

Hi Ceera

I did respond to the person and said I only speak English and never heard back from him/her. But I am curious to know what they said and to help them since it could be related to one of my designs or maybe with the bugs only getting half of it... don't know.. LOL and hense the need to figure out what language it is.

In Bablefish I tried them all and the closest translation was French, but still not all the words were. Going to go to the French Quarter and see maybe someone can help me in game. Thanks for all the responces here Everyone I do appreciate the help

The translation softwares can give you a ballpark answer, but they sometimes render whacked out translations. Good enough in a desperate situation tho. Did you save the IM? What was the question they asked, maybe somebody here can translate.

I'm not sure if this product can help you but it is free and at least translates what you say in open chat into various languages. (Not sure about IM's)

http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&SearchKeyword=babbler&SearchPriceMin=&SearchPriceMax=&SearchRatingMin=&SearchRatingMax=&sort=&dir=asc

Well,I'm not a seasoned translator,but if it's French language I may help you with all those definite articles and verbal subtleties... Just send me the IM in a notecard inworld,it does worth a try.

Hi Zazas.

First, you need to identify the language. Perhaps you could try the language identification site posted earlier by Molly MacKay. Or you might just try Google search: just cut and paste some text from the IM into Google search and see what you get. Just paste an entire phrase or short sentence word-for-word into the search text field and do a search on those words... this might identify the language. You might get best results by using Google Advanced Search and pasting the sentence as-is into the "with at least one of the words" field.

For instance, if a lot of the sites returned in the search listing have ".pt" and/or ".br" in the domain name, this would strongly indicate that the language is Portuguese.

Once you know the language, you can try an online machine translation.

For common languages like German, Spanish or Portuguese you can use Google Translate. For less common languages, at least for European languages anyway, there may be some online tools, for instance you could Google "Dutch online translation" and come up with some free online machine translation sites.

The machine translation may or may not help though... in particular if the message contains typos or abbreviations or IM-speak in the original language, the machine translation may be totally confused. A computer won't understand "I want 2 talk 2 u plz", and people sometimes write IMs that way in non-English languages too.

Thanks again e1 for the help... It was French! Will know next time what to try!!