I came up potentially with an idea for a document language translation service based on SAFE…
Yes, yes, I heard of online tools/softwares, Google, Yahoo, Babylon… But that’s not what I have in mind. I’m talking about translations that is performed by humans, translations that need to be of a profesional quality. With the globalization of the economy, lots of company have needs for translating various documents into different foreign languages, for commerce, legal, contracts, instruction manuals… This is typically done by a specialized industry, It costs some money to get suh a tranlation done.
So roughly, this how the idea might work:
You upload your Source Text/Document into SAFE.
(optional) Highlight the parts of the Source document that need to be translated.
You pay a certain amount of Safecoins, depending on the amount or words.
Your Source Text gets divided into different chunks (ie. each sentence is a different chunk).
Chunks get spread out to various persons that have native or very good knowledge of the target language.
Each translator gets paid a small amount of Safecoin for each sentence or chunks they translate.
All the tranlated chunks get reassembled to form the target document.
How the system may work from the tranlaters point of view:
It will look like a series of unrelated sentences/chunks you will have to translate. Like little “puzzles” you have to solve.
You will also get to assess the quality of other people’s work. Ie, mark them 5-stars, 4-stars,… (Or 0-stars if the target text is rude or dishonest).
There should be a ranking system, to asses one’s proficiency in a specific language. Translaters that are dishonnest/unreliable or not knowledgebale enough in a particular language will be de-ranked or banned.
Document confidentiality. Because the source documents are broken up into many bits, it is unlikely anyone may get the feel for what your whole document is about. In addition, there could be an automated system for masking real people names and places within a source document.
Thanks. I’ve seen your previous post about a Maidsafe translator. Whereas your idea was more around instant messaging I believe, this one here is more around text documents.
Interesting idea, but I think that translations between languages this way would really miss the boat, due to missing context and lack of convention between translators as to the approach for getting the concept across.
Mainly the context. An isolated sentence often has little meaning by itself. A translator wouldn’t even know what a pronoun might be referring to, for example, and so would lack the narrative and be likely to go very wrong.
A computer translation program would surely miss the boat, as well, but would do so in a consistent way, which one could account for to a large degree. Bit translations by numerous, disconnected translators would tend to be a real hash, I think.
I agree, context is the name of the game here. Chunking a source-text sentence by sentency is the most extreme case… Ideally, if an author is able to divide it into larger chunks (a few sentences / a single paragraph), it would be better.
Also, I believe the problem of a tranlater beeing able to understand the context could be at least partially solved if the author tags his document. Ie, What the document is about? News/Finance/Technology/Science/Legal…
Translators, could be ranked not only against their fluency of a particular tongue, but also for their expertise in a particular field.
Yes, I was thinking about the context part, but wouldn’t the biggest issue be that the rating system couldn’t work? I mean if nobody got a full document to translate and chunks are assigned randomly, then how can it work? I mean I can’t choose my translator.
Am I missing something?
Sounds like a great idea if it did work - just not chunking, instead translating full documents would seem to do it?
The rating/ranking system is certainly the most crucial/complicated part of the concept. I have just rumbled a rough idea at this stage,… I haven’t entirely figured that part out yet.
What I was thinking instead, you could select for your document to be translated only by people that have been rated above a certain score…
Sending full documents:
The translator sees the whole document.
That means you need to have a lot of faith in your translator, perhaps even know her/him on a personal level. You trust not only her/his language ability but you’re also entrusting that person fully with the confidentiality of your document.
Could become a very large job, if your document is 10s of pages.
Breaking document into chuncks:
A particular translator only sees a single chunck, not the whole document, so less risks around confidentiality.
I believe it would be possible to get more translators on board by breaking documents into bite-size chunks.
Yes, I get the advantage and it would be great if it could be figured out. My guess is that everyone would only use top rated translators though, as nobody wants to pay for Google translate gobbledegook level translations. Very interesting idea.
