Translation Engine As a built in feature

[jilly]

Would be cool to have a built in translation engine, so when a user signs up they pick their 'base' language. And all posts they read get translated automatically into their base language, and all replies they make get automatically translated back to the boards' base language.

(yes I am a serious dreamer.. lol)

So if you picked English as your boards' base language, and someone from mexico signed up and picked spanish as their base language, all posts they see would be automatically displayed to them in spanish, and they could post their response in spanish, and the board translates it back to english.. but to the original poster it would still show up as spanish.. LOL..

Or whatever.. some way so that everyone could be accomodated no matter what their base language..

[simsim]

The core concept of your suggestion isn't so hard to achieve, but I am quite sure Jelsoft would never ever by any means even think of implementing such a feature into their software. Because of the extreme complexity of language systems, computational linguistics as a science is still far from perfection to provide decent & acceptable automated translation results. However, there are grand milestones that have been achieved as well. There are many applications & platforms that you can integrate with vBulletin to make instant translation of your forum content into other languages, which would require custom coding, but I assure you the translated material would be rather immature, the least to say, & could be quite funny in many ways much of the time.

[Simetrical]

Quite simply, the best automated translators today are garbage. It would be extremely difficult to carry on a coherent conversation using them. And Jelsoft does not have access to the best automated translators without, presumably, steep license fees.

[jilly]

and it works as well as can be expected - my non native english speakers say it gives them enough to understand a post, so it's workable, but it would be nice to have more.. as stated in your response, it really isnt that good.. if anyone uses anything else for translation, please share!

[Andy Huang]

Initially, I thought your idea would be very easy to implement with a third party hack... Pass things through google translation or something and viola, done. Then I realized, wait, if I post in my base language (Chinese), and you post in your base language (English?), and random Russian dood comes along, -- bad translation aside -- Google/Altavista won't know how to translate English AND Chinese to Russian at the same time...

While it is an interesting idea; I don't think it will fly too well in true multicultral environment. Perhaps we should wait for someone to invent the universal translator before we harass Jelsoft to implement something like that