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orion_joel
12-26-2010, 09:15 PM
Hi All,

I am hoping that someone may be able to guide me to a suitable solution here, for a big project.

I have available to me hundreds of articles, which are all quite popular, all of which are in the public domain. There are many people interested in translating these articles, but many of them would like to see a central place this can happen. Rather then small individual tangents.

So to the point what I am looking for is an option that all the English articles will be placed on and people can come along and add their translation without a huge amount of difficulty. For example, they may have to sign up for an account but by doing so they automatically can log in and add a specific language translation for an article.

One option I looked at was mediawiki, however unless I am missing some blatantly obvious this seems quite hard to work with. However this is the kind of thing that I think would work well, just needs to be more straight forward to add content.

Thank-you for any suggestions I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

vangogh
12-27-2010, 11:17 AM
Welcome back Joel. Nice to see you again.

It sounds like a wiki is the right way to go since you want to allow people to login and be able to edit. Seems just what a wiki was created to do. I'm not sure how hard or easy mediawiki is to work with. What kind of problems are you having? Is it more the learning curve of using the software or that the software doesn't quite do what you want?

mattbeck
12-27-2010, 01:24 PM
Mediawiki has a fairly steep learning curve. It should be able to do what you need, but setup and management of it can be tricky. Not sure how I would tackle this, but a wiki seems like a good place to start. Without something like that you're going to have to write a bunch of code.

KristineS
12-27-2010, 02:52 PM
I was thinking a wiki would be the way to go too. I'm not sure what else could do what you want it to do.

Spider
12-27-2010, 04:12 PM
I don't know what the solution is but I will comment that I saw a very different need than the other posters. I didn't think you wanted people to go online and edit your articles. If you do want that, then - yes, a wiki would serve the bill. But do you really want other people editing your articles? You didn't say that.

I understood that the articles in English that you post will remain uneditable. Visitors (members, if you like) are to be allowed to post a translation article - the same article but in a different language. That doesn't seem to me to be what a wiki would do. The translation article will be a totally new file, not a modification of the original file. Something like a follow-up post in a blog.

Best to clarify what it is you are trying to do.

orion_joel
12-27-2010, 05:05 PM
Spider, to some degree you are correct, I wouldn't expect people would want to edit the english version. However this being said, a wiki does allow you to protect pages from what I can understand, so that not everyone can edit certain pages.

The biggest problem I found with mediawiki, was just trying to figure out how to do basic things. For example it took me almost half an hour to figure out how to create a new page, and at this point a couple of days later I still have not figure out how to create an alternate language version of that page. The worst thing I have found is that the support files on the mediawiki site are terribly vague, and seem to assume that you have an excellent understanding of the platform right from the start.

Ideally I would have liked to use something like Wordpress or Joomla, however not so sure if there is any decent plugin's that give wiki type of abilities to integrate other language version to the original article quickly, and allow anyone to sign up for an account and be able to edit/create these alternate language files, without a lot of backend work.

Business Attorney
12-27-2010, 06:24 PM
... it took me almost half an hour to figure out how to create a new page, and at this point a couple of days later I still have not figure out how to create an alternate language version of that page.

I may be wrong, but in mediawiki I think you would simply create a new page and give the new page a different name. For example a Spanish language version of "My House" might be named "My House (Spanish version)" or "Mi Casa". Then you would probably cross-link the two articles so that someone reading the English-language version could easily locate the Spanish-language version and vice versa.

Using wiki software, if you chose not to protect the non-English versions then contributors could improve the translations over time.

A couple of years ago, I was looking at Drupal for a possible project and one of the features was that you could let different users create and/or edit different pages. My guess is that if it could be done in Drupal two years ago, then there must be a way to do it in WordPress today, since WP has advanced nicely from a blogging platform to a fairly full-featured CMS.

Harold Mansfield
12-27-2010, 07:58 PM
All of the other things are possible with Wordpress. It's the organization of one article in different languages that I'm still thinking about. I am 75% certain that there is a way to do this with Wordpress, I just need some time to contemplate what plug in or combination of plug ins would make it user friendly.

Harold Mansfield
12-27-2010, 08:07 PM
OK, I'm getting there. I know there is a language plug in that you can use with your community features (aka Buddypress) that will allow users to choose their choice of language:
Languages for WordPress MU - A pack of 36 different languages, ready for you to drop into your WordPress MU site for some serious translation action - WPMU DEV (http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/languages-for-wordpress-mu)
The new version of Buddypress allows you to pick and choose which features you want to utilize, so you don't have to have features that you don't need.

I'm thinking...combined with a wiki plug in it would work the way you want. Members can log in, create a profile and choose their language, and then with the proper permissions (set by you) will be able to edit wiki('ed) articles that you have posted.

There may be some backend fine tuning to make things a little more user friendly for non-wordpress users , but in theory I think it would work.

vangogh
12-27-2010, 11:07 PM
And there are plenty of wiki related plugins (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=wiki) you could use.

orion_joel
12-28-2010, 07:22 AM
Thanks for the thoughts, I am thinking that workpress is going to be the definite way to go. Would be interested in thoughts on this plugin, called Transposh. It does automatic translations, using either Google or Bing (which ever you select) and then has an option for a user (can be permissions based or just any user logged in or not) to adjust the translation accordingly. So as we all know automated translations are not great. But basically what this plug in does is translate it in phrases, and with the option ticked when on a different language it puts a little click thing on each phrase which will then show the user the original text and translated text and allow them to change it as they see fit.

Harold Mansfield
12-28-2010, 09:27 AM
Thanks for the thoughts, I am thinking that workpress is going to be the definite way to go. Would be interested in thoughts on this plugin, called Transposh. It does automatic translations, using either Google or Bing (which ever you select) and then has an option for a user (can be permissions based or just any user logged in or not) to adjust the translation accordingly. So as we all know automated translations are not great. But basically what this plug in does is translate it in phrases, and with the option ticked when on a different language it puts a little click thing on each phrase which will then show the user the original text and translated text and allow them to change it as they see fit.

Don't know that one do you have a link?

vangogh
12-28-2010, 11:32 AM
New plugin to me too. If you have a link to it that would be great. One thing though. The plugin seems counter to the goal of having real people translate the article. Was that an important requirement or was the goal mostly to get an acceptable translation as quickly and easily as possible?

orion_joel
12-28-2010, 08:46 PM
Here is a link for Trasposh - Transposh – Breaking language barriers (http://transposh.org/)

Initially I would have liked the translation to be done by human's. However the more I thought about it, the more i realized that people may not have the time to translate whole articles all at once or the like. So having an automated translation that people can modify in small chunks (or phrases) would make it more accessible to happen quicker. However as I am sure we all know some languages the automated translation have a heck of a time with, so maybe this is also a poor idea, I am unsure.

Possibly the best bit I like about this plug in is when you select a different language it actually changes everything to that language for the whole blog, menus and all.

If I could find the right plugin otherwise I would still change to a different option, but I really like this plug I literally went from a blank wordpress install to importing (using Import HTML Pages plugin) 1000+ pages and having it all instantly translatable in under 15 minutes. So if not this plug in All I need now is something in wordpress that will handle multiple translations of the same page, by users without big amounts of work on the backend by me.

vangogh
12-29-2010, 01:26 AM
Since you're thinking of automating the translation now I think WordPress along with the plugin makes the most sense. It should be the easiest to set up. Automated translations are never great, but I suppose they're better than no translation, especially as the automated programs have gotten better in recent years.

Spider
12-29-2010, 09:02 AM
Better make sure the readers of the translated article know that it is auto-translated, if the translations are not good. You know how we downgrade in our mind a poorly written article in English, so other people do the same thing in their language. You don't want to lose credibility because a poor translation gives the impression of an uneducated author.

Inviting corrections might go some way solving that, but the poor impression is still there and may still have a negative effect. Plus which, you don't know the language skill of every person who tries to "improve" the auto-translation, so your auto-translation could go from bad to worse!

Just a couple of points that spring to mind. I don't have a solution for you but knowing a problem is halfway to its solution, they say!

BTW - it occurs to me that anyone who is good enough in English to be able to correct the translation of an English article into a foreign language probably doesn't need the translation in the first place. And the person who is not proficient in English wouldn't know if the transaltion was a good one or not, other than any bad grammar and incorrect punctuation.

Harold Mansfield
12-29-2010, 09:33 AM
The problem with keeping an auto translator running on your site is that it continues to work. Even if you edit the articles to clean up the translation, when people click from say English to Spanish, it auto translates all over again for that reader.
You would probably have to post all of the articles, let the translator run...copy the rough translation of each article in each language (or document the URLs), and re-post them without using the auto translator...and then clean them up.
However, if I remember correctly, the last time that I used one on one of my blogs, when you turn it off...the URLS are still indexed in Google, but unless you repost the links, are not accessible to readers.
When you turn it off, it really creates havoc with the available pages and they eventually drop from the SERPs because the plug in isn't actually providing the translated pages anymore.

They may have come a long way since I used them, but that is what I remember.