Feature request/discussion: multi-lingual posts

[arthaey]

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'm also interested in making a lang-8–ish option here, but that's a separate task from this proposal, which is merely supporting non-English outside of the Multilingual Room without actually stopping English from being the lingua franca.

[sctroyenne]

The thing that would make a corrections feature difficult to implement would be how to handle more than one set of corrections. Maybe some kind of corrections indicator with a drop down list of different correcters with their corrections layered over the text?

And speaking of corrections I'm trying to think how I would post in my L2s here. Would I write, proofread a bit and post directly or would I submit my writing to Lang-8 or iTalki first to get a cleaned up version to post here. It seems a bit "dishonest" to pass off my writing as better than it really is (not to mention it's a much slower process) but at the same time I feel a responsibility to post the best writing I can so as to not have a language class or Meetup group effect where we're all learners who just reinforce each others' errors. Maybe indicate at the bottom that when my post has been proofread in advance?

[rdearman]

The thing that would make a corrections feature difficult to implement would be how to handle more than one set of corrections. Maybe some kind of corrections indicator with a drop down list of different correcters with their corrections layered over the text?

Or maybe each persons corrections in a different colour? And you can click on a colour in sidebar to toggle a persons corrections on and off? That would allow you to compare and contrast the corrections, and show one or more at the same time.

[arthaey]

O modful powers that be, can the discussions about lang-8–esque features be split into a new thread?

[AlexTG]

It's a good idea, but I don't think current-day machine translators are up to the challenge, except, maybe, between Romance/Germanic languages and English (and even then you sometimes get a sentence whose meaning is completely inverted, which would derail discussions). Japanese to English machine translations are usually unintelligible.

[arthaey]

It's a good idea, but I don't think current-day machine translators are up to the challenge, except, maybe, between Romance/Germanic languages and English (and even then you sometimes get a sentence whose meaning is completely inverted, which would derail discussions). Japanese to English machine translations are usually unintelligible.

Personally, I'd be more like to manually provide my own translation of what I meant to say, in any case. And even with the somewhat-amusingly-wrong machine translation, I still think it could be a pretty useful addition to the forums.

What if we did a trial run in one thread, say, to see how it goes, iron out the (inevitable) kinks, iterate on it, and see if it works out in practice? (Pending that I actually implement this forum extension first, of course! )

[Arnaud]

deleted

[arthaey]

Something that would be interesting with a multi-lingual extension would be crowdsourcing translating any forum post into any language. The technical details of permissions for editing someone else's post, but only for adding translations, and also the social aspects of allowing/moderating this, could be quite tricky... But in my head, it's a beautiful future...

That said, while the future of ntrHTLAL is still undecided, I'm going to hold off doing any private work on such a forum extension. (In the meanwhile, I'm hacking on Anki instead. )

[Expugnator]

The thing that would make a corrections feature difficult to implement would be how to handle more than one set of corrections. Maybe some kind of corrections indicator with a drop down list of different correcters with their corrections layered over the text?

And speaking of corrections I'm trying to think how I would post in my L2s here. Would I write, proofread a bit and post directly or would I submit my writing to Lang-8 or iTalki first to get a cleaned up version to post here. It seems a bit "dishonest" to pass off my writing as better than it really is (not to mention it's a much slower process) but at the same time I feel a responsibility to post the best writing I can so as to not have a language class or Meetup group effect where we're all learners who just reinforce each others' errors. Maybe indicate at the bottom that when my post has been proofread in advance?

At another thread (Spanish forum) I suggested that when writing in multilingual environments, native speakers should have a different mark - it could be as simple as a formatting hint, such as 'italic'. Since there are usually more learners than native speakers, it's easier to just mark the natives' posts.

[emk]

By the way, there's one tool I can offer to any of the programmers here who are thinking about the possibilities: I have a high-performance wrapper around Google's cld2 ("compact language detector") that I can make available as a free web service. So if your design involves automatically detecting the language of a post, I can provide an API which does that, and which doesn't require paying anybody money.

(For the ultra-technical members of the audience, it's a Rust-based web service that I can stick inside a docker container on a server, and safely ignore for a few years at a time.)