Feature request/discussion: multi-lingual posts

[arthaey]

I wish I could write my posts here in Spanish, to practice more, without making the forum a fragmented disaster.

I don't know what the technical capabilities of the latest phpBB software are, or how user-extensible it is, but...

Two assumptions:

1. We want to keep the main discussion language as English, for greatest reach.
2. We also want to practice the languages we're learning as much as possible.

I'm imagining that I could have written this post in Spanish and either provided my own translation (of what I meant to say, hehe) or an machine translation into English would be automatically added by the forum software. And then each user has preferences for what language(s) they want to be shown automatically vs collapsed by default.

What do you think? Is this A) desirable and B) feasible?

Note that I'd be willing to program it up myself, if phpBB does turn out to be extensible in this way and the Powers That Be give me access.

[arthaey]

Please note my first assumption, that we, as a community, want to keep the main forums in English. And this seems true, based on the fact that we have just one board (the "Multilingual Room") where we relegate non-English discussions.

I'm wanting to bring non-English outside of the Multilingual Room board, without compromising this (reasonable, IMO) desire of the community.

[sctroyenne]

Wow, I was just thinking of this while I was reading 1e4e6's post about the multilingual boards and right before I saw your post! So my vision is to have basically a multi-layered post. I can write a post in English then have the option of writing one or more in an L2. Along the bottom something will display indicating that there's one or more alternate versions. Maybe some feature allowing for corrections.

The reason I would be doing my own post twice is that I find I've been good at training my brain to go into "French mode" when I'm communicating in French rather than always translating. But now I find that when I really think about how I would say something in English, my English is so much richer. In French mode I'm not even aware of how much I'm limited compared to my English because I'm so used to making do with what I have. So I have thought of translating my own English as an exercise.

An added bonus would be that if enough people offer up their own translations of the content of this site** and that gets indexed then we could maybe attract a lot more language learners with weaker English who can contribute to us learning their languages and they benefit from all the content and discussion in English.

**Side-note for another non-coding project: Translating some of the HTLAL classic posts for distribution to the whole non-English world....

[arthaey]

So, ie4e6, are you explicitly saying that you would be against changing how things were from the old forum? You would not want us to add the ability to have non-English posts (that also always had English translations) outside of the Multilingual Room?

I understand that that's how things used to be; I'm proposing we change things.

[emk]

I'm imagining that I could have written this post in Spanish and either provided my own translation (of what I meant to say, hehe) or an machine translation into English would be automatically added by the forum software. And then each user has preferences for what language(s) they want to be shown automatically vs collapsed by default.

What do you think? Is this A) desirable and B) feasible?

That's a fun idea! A bit off the wall, maybe, but fun. I've also (very idly) thought it would be nice to have an "allow people to offer corrections on this post" checkbox that worked a bit like lang-8. Of course that would be a ton of work.

So, extensions.

If somebody writes us a cool extension, and everybody is like, "Wow, yeah, we always needed that!", we can integrate it into the forum pretty easily. (And I'd love for it to be as easy as us merging a pull request and hitting "Deploy" somewhere.) Just try very hard to avoid patching the core phpBB source code if at all possible.

If somebody wants to write a big extension which might even affect forum culture, it might be better to make mockups and discuss it with people first.

[arthaey]

That's a fun idea! A bit off the wall, maybe, but fun. I've also (very idly) thought it would be nice to have an "allow people to offer corrections on this post" checkbox that worked a bit like lang-8. Of course that would be a ton of work.

Adding lang-8–esque functionality here would be awesome! And, yeah a lot of work. Depending on how my forays into phpBB extension writing goes, we'll see.

If somebody wants to write a big extension which might even affect forum culture, it might be better to make mockups and discuss it with people first.

I agree that this could be in the "might even affect forum culture" class, so I'll draw up some mocks to show what I mean. "A picture's worth a thousand words" and all that.

[arthaey]

I'll draw up some mocks to show what I mean. "A picture's worth a thousand words" and all that.

Alrighty, I got a functional mockup going: CodePen demo

What do y'all think?

Edit: If we do end up doing this, a note on automatic translation costs... Bing seems to be the major API that still has a free option — the first 2 million characters per month are free. So we should be saving translations, and perhaps even only do them on demand (rather than automatically). It costs $10 USD per million characters once you exceed 2 million characters per month.

Do we have data on how many characters were posted to the original HTLAL forums in an average month?

[rdearman]

I'll draw up some mocks to show what I mean. "A picture's worth a thousand words" and all that.

Alrighty, I got a functional mockup going: CodePen demo

What do y'all think?

Edit: If we do end up doing this, a note on automatic translation costs... Bing seems to be the major API that still has a free option — the first 2 million characters per month are free. So we should be saving translations, and perhaps even only do them on demand (rather than automatically). It costs $10 USD per million characters once you exceed 2 million characters per month.

Do we have data on how many characters were posted to the original HTLAL forums in an average month?

That is cool! You could probably get that information with an SQL query on the backup mrwarper did. The link is floating around in the thread about htlal being down. On a phone so difficult to find it for you. You could find max and average values then.

[Stelle]

Alrighty, I got a functional mockup going: CodePen demo

Oooooh...pretty!

[astromule]

I don't know if I understood correctly, but are we going to have a lang-8 option for corrections? That would be great! I don't know if it's possible or convenient, but I'd like to have the function "write/correct" here aswell. We could even add a point based system, below the Aikido belts.

Why not use lang-8 instead? Because lang-8 limits you (in the free version) to just writing in two languages. Most of us here are studing more than two languages. Besides, it would allow us to receive corrections from a friendly enviroment and well known people, as we know where they come from. That is, the corrections would stay inside the community. As most of us log here everyday, it would be easy to just press "correct" to see the entries in Spanish (in my case) that would need a correction.