I think it would be helpful to add a moderation option for transfering questions on the Answers Forum to the Answers Forum for a different language. If not a moderation option, maybe a discussion thread on Meta?
This is a great suggestion and something we've talked about a bit in the past. Thanks for bringing it up, @andrewsawesome! I'll bump back into our queue of things to consider.
@andrewsawesome so, I've been checking out the Answer sections across the pond. I honestly am very surprised about how few Questions and Answers are provided. It seems like the English version (ours) is the most visited. I could imagine that this is related to timeliness and maybe even quality of our answers. After all, you go to the site that offers the good answers instead of somewhere where you only hear crickets. I would hate to send somebodies Question into a "Vacuum" and never getting it answered. I think a "universal translator" is needed that allows us to answer questions from anywhere regardless of language. We are already a pretty global bunch of people, why not extend this to the "other" forums? Why not take those borders down and make us truly a global community?
6 Comments:
I wouldn't be against this-just show a message at the top of the Answer with a disclaimer that it has been translated.
by Andrew S
@andrewsawesome I know the guides get translated but can you imagine the workforce required to go through our Answers Section. Darn, we'd keep them way to busy.
by oldturkey03
@oldturkey03 NVM. I thought we already had a machine translation engine for the untranslated community-made guides, but I might be wrong.
by Andrew S
@andrewsawesome I think the idea is actually a good one. We just need more info on the translation part. I am up for doing whatever works best for everybody.
by oldturkey03
@oldturkey03 FYI Jessa's pricing on MBP board level repairs beats every one by a long shot. Sending my first one off in the morning. This can really make a difference in repairability!
by mayer
Hey @andrewsawesome!
That truly is awesome!
Reasons why the English forum is so much more lively is of course the outstanding quality and timeliness of your answers!!! But also the fact that English-speaking users still is by far the biggest portion of our active members.
That's a bit of a hen and egg problem, because in order to get more people to use our forums in the other languages, we kind of have to provide more content first and/or assure that their questions get an answer. What we've been doing so far from our side to make sure that good content is also available for forum users in other language subdomains is that every 3 months, we'd look at the top 10 Answers in the English forum, see if they make sense to translate, and then post a summary with disclaimer and backlinks to the original, like this one, for example: https://de.ifixit.com/Antworten/Ansehen/....
I know that's not much, but it's a start, and all we could implement so far with the limited staff we have for the other languages.
Machine translation is of course available if one activates the toggle below the language switcher on the top right, but we only point out to it if necessary, because we don't want to "lose" the few active members we have to the English forum :-) Also, I think that while you'd be able to read a translated version, the answer would probably only pop up in search results when one types in the English words. I'm not sure how exactly you imagine the moderation option: Do you think of having a feature to click on that would then machine translate question and existing answer(s) and comments over to a foreign language forum? If that's what you imagine, the question would be why we'd use a feature instead of always automatically having a post go live in all languages and then asking the global community for help...before we can start looking into potential new functionalities, we'd have to spec out a bit what exactly we want and what would make sense. Please add your thoughts here if you want to take part in that, I'd very much appreciate!
For now, I think the best way you could temporarily help until we see the user base grow in foreign languages, if that's not too much to ask, would be to try answering new questions directly in the subdomain forums for any language you may speak or you may also use deep.com, which does a way better job than google translate from English into other languages.
If, on top of that, you'd be interested in taking part in posting or putting together those summaries for translation, I'd be totally happy to help in any way I can, with a Meta-post of top 10-20 English answers every 3 months for example?
THANK YOU SO MUCH AGAIN for bringing this up, for your interest, and @oldturkey03 for your willingness to make us truly a global community!!!
3 Comments:
@sandrahiller I say until Sterling fixes the Universal Translator, we just stick with what we know and what we can use. It is interesting to visit the "other" forums and just wish we could interact more. The "international" forums seem to be rather, well "blah". Not much going on and not a whole lot of traffic. I think we all need to venture out a bit and maybe get things going with some timely and helpful answers. I think we have just the right people on this site of the pond that could do it. Thank you, Sandra, for keeping us informed.
by oldturkey03
Sandra is on a well deserved vacation, but in our last meeting this came up in conversation:
Another option that came to my mind and might require less of an effort is that each time you post a new guide or a new answer, you could go to the language switcher and see if a similar question for the device had been posted in a subdomain, and then add a link to the new content you’ve already provided, maybe with a standard phrase such as “Not sure if that matches your question 100%, but maybe this can help”. Might sound a bit like spamming, but it wouldn’t be in this case.
The idea would be to spread the knowledge around in a delicate way so that we don't come across as pushy. Our goal (which I know you know) is to help every one fix every thing. =]
by Amber Taus
@amber great idea and I will give that a try. Thanks!
by oldturkey03
Related to @oldturkey03 's answer, we have talked about the idea of having a "universal translator" kind of feature before, but there are several technical issues that have prevented it. As I imagined it, we would take every question/answer and machine translate it into every language. e.g. If you ask a question in German, we automatically save an English, Spanish, French etc. version. Then someone can answer the question in English, which gets auto-translated back to German, Spanish, French, etc. Ideally, this would make cross-language discussion possible and also help kickstart our non-English communities, since people would find answers through their non-English Google results.
The first problem is that Google does not want to index machine-translated content, and they can reduce your rank if they detect a lot of it. As a site that depends on searchability, that alone would make it a no-go. Second, my understanding is that for English, the machine translations are pretty good, but I have heard from some of our multilingual technical writers that machine translation quality (especially of technical instructions) can be quite poor depending on the source and destination languages. I only speak English, so I can't validate this personally, but their recommendation was to avoid relying on machine translation. The third reason is that while running something through Google Translate is free for a user to do through their browser, translating through the api (as we would to implement this feature) costs us money per translation and is not unlimited. We have hundreds of thousands of posts and comments, and scaling that to all the languages we support would mean millions of translations. It also raises some tricky questions about how to handle edits or manual translation fixes.
I still think it would be a cool idea, but I don't see us adding an automatic universal translation feature any time soon. If Google didn't penalize us for machine-translated content, then I think we could figure out the other problems, but as it stands, I don't see it happening any time soon.
1 Comment:
@sterlinghirsh it would be nice if this could be overcome, wouldn't it be? Truly universal with the click of a button :-) Until we get there, I guess we just continue to utilize whatever resources are available to us. I do get a kick out of some of the generated translations. It is hard to make sense out of "feeling blue", "Garage sale" and even "throwing under the bus" since it still gets literally translated (some languages). I do speak/read/write German, even rusty I can still catch those sites messing things up. Anyhow, you keep fixing the machine translations and keep working on the Universal Translator and we'll do the rest. Sterling, thanks for all that you are doing!
by oldturkey03
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