Kwa hukumu hii ya makala, mimi alitumia uwezo mwezi Google Translate kutafsiri kati ya Kiingereza na Kiswahili, ambayo ni jambo kuu.
That may have been complete gibberish, but it's an option that wasn't available just a few days ago on Google Translate which allows one to translate to and from Swahili or Afrikaans to all of the other languages that were already available. I wrote a bit more about this here for those interested. But here, we just wanted to announce that because of this change, the Maneno Translation Assistant is now able to help out with translations between Swahili to English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. This is the first local African language to gain this ability and we welcome it with great thanks.
Last year, when Maneno was in the early stages of planning, we had the pleasure of attending the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008 in Budapest, Hungary. It was a glorious series of days talking and interacting with people from around the world who are heavily invested in citizen journalism in some form or another. While the topics were broad and many impressively stuck out, there were a number of comments from those involved in the translation efforts of Global Voices Lingua.
During the sessions, we had heard from people at Google who worked in the machine translation section, as well as other people working to make language translation an automated event. This is all well and good, but given the heuristics and methods we have currently, it is simply never as good as a human translator. To those representing these technology initiatives, the human translators raised the issue of, "Why is it that all new translation technology attempts to replace the human translator as opposed to augment what they do?"
If I recall, there wasn't too much said from the speakers, but my own personal reaction to this is that because a great deal of the technology is created in the United States, which is an inherently monolingual society, you get this general approach. Working between two, three, or even four languages on a daily basis is not a common occurrence, so it's beyond the horizons of most companies and developers in the country. Thus, the reason for attempting to bypass the problem with technology altogether as opposed to trying to improve the situation at hand.
Google does have some mighty useful tools though when taken in the frame of reference that they are machine translation and not to create entire translations. That being the case, we've made some large changes to our translation system on Maneno. A big, noticeable change is that we've streamlined the translation composition page even more. Those translators we heard talked about having a simple, side by side page where they can easily work on the translation. We've worked to make this possible and think that what we have is getting quite good, although we're always open to feedback on it.
The other noticeable change is the addition of what we're calling the 'Translation Assistant'. This is a very simple window you can open on the translation page that interacts directly with the Google Translate API. It's there in case trying to remember a couple of words from the source article is just not happening and a translator wants to do a quick lookup in the target language. The Assistant is not there for translating entire articles, but just as an aid to a human translator as it should be.
We were also working to embed Google's Translate Gadget as well. This would be in case you're viewing an article that is only in French, but maybe you only speak Swedish or Chinese. By using the Gadget, you'd then be able to get a better-than-nothing machine translation in to your language. The issue was that putting it on pages was confusing and took away from the whole purpose of our translation system, which is to make it easier to have human translators write proper translations of articles in order to link between the language sphere silos. The code is ready to go and we'd still like to include it, so if anyone has any feedback, leave a comment or contact us directly to give your thoughts on what you think would work best.
Otherwise, happy translating and we hope that these aids make the transition between languages an enjoyable one.
