This is a single archived entry from Stefan Tilkov’s blog. For more up-to-date content, check out my author page at INNOQ, which has more information about me and also contains a list of published talks, podcasts, and articles. Or you can check out the full archive.

Auto-translating Forums

Stefan Tilkov,

Graham Glass:

When someone posts to a forum, we store the posting and its original language setting. If someone who speaks a different language reads the post, we automatically call Google translate and display the translated version with the original version. We also cache the translated version so the next time the same thing happens the translation is instantaneous.

A cool idea! Sadly, the first text in his example screenshot shows the limitations of machine translation – the German text makes absolutely no sense :-)

On May 21, 2008 10:56 AM, Aristotle Pagaltzis said:

Yeah, monolingual English speakers tend to assume that machine translation works. (Actually, monolinguals in general are prone to this, but English speakers appear to be more rarely confronted with the products of such attempts.)

On May 21, 2008 11:15 AM, Richie said:

I hope they don’t cache the (wrong) translations forever.

On May 21, 2008 1:14 PM, Arjen Poutsma said:

Obviously, they should have used my thesis for optimal results!

On May 22, 2008 4:03 AM, Erik Johnson said:

but English speakers appear to be more rarely confronted with the products of such attempts.

…which is why our forums Google translate English to German and then back to English. It levels the playing field.