Issues Around Translation Demand
From Aspirationtech.org Wiki
what do people want to read?
ethan: sumo wrestling in japanese
anna: speaks 7 languages!
ivan: japanese bicycle racing
dwayne: first african novels
andranik: local content of countries he wants to visit
marc: soccer & restaurant reviews
jaimin: travel
davor: armenian literature
anhrash: other people's history
thom: nonenglish wikipedia
leonard: korean lit
george: arabic
ed: foreign blogs, middle east news
ed: comments close to the locale of the news events
kevin: arab-drifting slang
basanta:
anas: indonesian elections
carolyn: farsi
link.tv
most of us want to understand something we can't
machine translation is good at telling you that you want to know more, but not really comprehend it
social translation -- involving more people in a project (yeeyan)
write to the author, make it accessible to others
how do we aggregate demand
what is the motivation for a translator
close the loop: how does it benefit the wider world
curated texts: decided by editors for the users
the demand is not necessarily there originally
the cold start problem
how do texts come into the community
dotsub: "in plain english"
video: argentina, arabic, china
twitter as a tool for determining demand
{{{#jp-en}}} request for translation protocol -- crowd sourcing for volunteer translators
the readers' demand is less signficant than the translators' demand
translators could be affiliated with location, topic
who is creating demand?
1. audience demand: choosing what is interesting to you
2. translator/author demand
3. publisher demand
yeeyan: articles recommended by users; translators choose what they want to translate
chinese language speakers find articles to translate from english to chinese
voting process but not widely used -- training issue
translator makes the final choice
Tedtalk translations by dotsub -- over 40 languages, high quality conceptual application
publisher demand -- ted needed these translated
close the loop between the tools/translators and the user community
promote around the language or around the topic
connect communities of interest with common passion but not a common language
content owners
multilingual forums: goal.com -- soccer
don't assume that we shouldn't do it just because google might
and we should not stop doing something just because google does?
cooking, crafts, hiphop ... popular culture
put the translation demand on the publisher
originally, people write in english as a second or third language; now more people are writing in their native language
how does it serve the authors' interests to translate their content
- can the browser remember a user's search in a target language?
eg: i know english/spanish, i do a search with results in chinese; the browser should show me a summary in my target language and remember the demand for that source/target - publicly deposited data for this demand: google, twitter etc.
identifying interest vs actual translation: find the human translation if it exists before offering the machine translation
translating the query to start
guidelines for searching through other languages
tricks: google will offer a translation if you search in one language setting in a different locale
- what is the commercial opportunity?
following the money -- who is advertising
demand communities: hobbies/language/publishers
obvious cross points: a foreign leader gives a speech in another country -- obvious demand for translation of the speech and the commentary.
- pitfalls: translating into multiple languages leads to a segregated discussion rather than a truly multilingual discussion
public interest
testpilot.com
