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GUI Improvements - Language Translation

One of the issues I see is the person asking a question has a tough time asking their question in english.

Now the problem translating - Either one can't make sense on what is being asked (if in broken english) or if in a different language (i.e.: Ecran défectueux / pantalla defectuosa the question is left unanswered unless someone speaks the language or its translated by someone to english. This also maybe in a different script than Roman like Arabic, Cyrillic, Farsi, Hanzi, Hiragana, or Kanji.

If we want people from other countries to be involved we do need a way to translate the short description and the text body seamlessly between them and english.

So far I've been using Google translate and then tweak the conversion so its more readable. While I realize this is not easy, can we find a better way of breaking the language bearer for many who are not native english speakers.

I would love to see a dual description & content field setup. The primary being the native language and a second one which is filled in by Google translate when they have finished composing their question in english.

That way they see it and if they speak some english they can then edit it if it doesn't make sense in their eyes. Later when we see it we can tweak it up a bit if needed. in any case the english description field is shown when the person viewing preferred language is english and the original posters field is shown when the question is opened as the second field.

OK, now the question, answer & comment fields:

Can we do the same here? Having a dual field setup one with the native tongue and the other in english? Then the other problem here is how does this get translated to the other language? Can we get Google transition to do it bi-directionally? Don't forget we still need to tweak things without the alteration being pushed across via the translation engine.

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Dan , I think this has come up in the past a lot. I am not sure if ifixit ever accomplished some sort of translation. I remember that there were plenty of challenges. I suppose for now we need to continue with the way we are doing it now. ( I noticed your Dutch is getting better:-) I was thinking that it might help us if we can at least determine where the original poster is from. Some sort of national flag system with the question. It does not help if we link, for example to digikey or mouser, if the person has no access to those resources. I think we could give more valuable answers if a location reference was readily available to us.

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Yes! Getting an idea of their location would be a step in the right direction. While we might not get any translation going auto-magically, I still would like a dual field setup so we don't have to always go in to edit or write a comment element which is messy from a readability stand point. Then later we could see if the translation services would fit.

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That's fair, we could easily show what country / language they're using.

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We are working on much better multilingual support across the site. Questions, answers, and comments are high on the to-do list.

I want to present people with questions in their language first with the hope of growing self-supporting language-specific communities.

We're working on figuring out an exact plan, and once we have it sorted out I will make a proposal here for how it could work. I think google translate should be an important part of the workflow.

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Thanks Kyle!

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Dan will be eternally grateful.