So many features, so little time

[jducoeur]

Sorry about so much CommYou burbleage today, but the news is proving really interesting for me.

Today's new feature in the story list (albeit down in the backlog for the time being) is automatic translation. This is suddenly looking plausible due to Google announcing a new Translation API. Using this, I ought to be able to include translation in my UI cheaply. You say that you prefer to read in English. Someone comments in your journal in Chinese. The UI automatically detects that the comment is in Chinese, and when you go to read it, translates it into English. (Probably fairly *bad* English, mind, but still more useful to most people than the original Mandarin.)

Until now, that would have been a major pain in the ass, but from the sound of things, I could probably now implement it in a week, maybe even less. And the potential for spreading conversations internationally is *really* cool. Today, nearly all conversation systems are balkanized along languages lines. Heaven only knows what the effect of breaking that down would be, but the potential is really neat.

God, I love the modern Internet biz. It's hectic and crazy, and hard to keep up with, but it's fun as hell to be in the middle of...

[ETA: Y'know, I'm going to have to think about when I do this. On the one hand, it's a fringy kind of feature; OTOH, it's something nobody else does, and it's potentially kind of revolutionary. I'll need some "revolutionary" to make a splash when the system hits release time, and this is one of those features that could get a lot of press. Hmm...]

Comments

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Will CommYou be intra-service? Or inter-service. If the latter: there's your feature.

[jducoeur]

I'm planning on eventually having account linking across services, if that's what you're asking; and yes, that's a very powerful feature. But there will probably be limits to what I can do without violating the terms of service of some of the providers. (In particular, Facebook makes the problem tricky, because of their explicit limits on your right to cache the friends list.)

Anyway -- you're certainly correct. But I don't mind having a few additional "wow"s in the mix, especially if they are both powerful and not too hard to implement. The name of the game is changing the world, and when I'm ready to open it up to the public, I'd like to startle the hell out of the commentariat...

[corwyn-ap.livejournal.com]

Primus: Google really should have (and I don't know that they don't) a mechanism for providing feedback, better translations, etc. for their tool. This would allow constant improvement, in much the same way that their search engine improves, for their translation tool. And the more people (like you) that use it, the better for them.

Secondus: "Heaven only knows what the effect of breaking that down would be, but the potential is really neat." ... and created more and bloodier wars than any other... oh wait that was babelfish not google...

[jducoeur]

Yeah, I'll admit that the Babelfish reference had occurred to me as well...

[dsrtao]

Of course, the test plugins for "translate this" should include ROT13, Pig Latin and SwedishChef...

[jducoeur]

Well, of course Google's *own* UI has been translated into damned near everything, including Klingon. I assume there will be some demand to open the translation system up to those languages as well...

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

The UI automatically detects that the comment is in Chinese, and when you go to read it, translates it into English. (Probably fairly *bad* English, mind, but still more useful to most people than the original Mandarin.)

Sorry, I'm from Missouri on this one. Except for very short, very clear snippets, I have yet to see anything really worthwhile in automatic translation. I have the FoxLingo toolbar, and I've tried InterTran for Latin-to-English, and this is the best I get (you may recognize this):

When before yearly produce some greekmetromaxiar greek our upon - dustria perpolitam , upon the common people ederem fa - ctu'mque according to illustrissimum Cantabrigien - if you wish Academiae Cancellarium , tribe he who was born of the word out of - cusarem , to go back me , now that eagerness good doctis.q welcome forem , if you wish upon arte Geometrica similar game ludere to be able , risk at any time deed. And our quae - dem hominibus , greatly Cantabrigiensibus , enough appeased la - bor he how drive out , to approach when counting from her academiae brash - relating to a store-room viro to give a hint , and me instruction and kindness case at law admonish coniuncto rogatus to be when among magna to swim - uae bibliothecae volumina , how he at that time very to study and not nullo expenses to stitch exornandam susceperat triobolarem that greekmetromaxia [? greek little book collocandum mitterem

Not a big help....Now, if an engine barfs that badly on Elizabethan Neo-Latin, can we expect better with a language so very foreign as Mandarin? I wonder.

[jducoeur]

Fair point, but there are two counter-points. First, there just aren't as many people putting effort into translation in and out of Latin at this point, so it's a fairly extreme example, and relatively immature technology. The auto-translations I've gotten from, say, French or German, while far from great, aren't nearly such terrible gibberish.

Second, this is still fairly new technology, only just hitting the big time now. Yes, it's kinda bad -- but it's getting noticeably less bad each year. And the more it gets used, the more evolutionary pressure there is to make it better. So I do expect it to gradually keep improving. It's marginally useful today; it'll be a little moreso tomorrow. I wouldn't mind being involved with the wave slowly pushing that along. (Yes, I'm explicitly assuming that the problem isn't intractable -- just fairly hard. But with Google's resources behind it, I expect steady improvement.)

translate chats from livejournal pages

[hablalj.livejournal.com]

We've implemented this in a live web to jabber chat client called Hab.la (which works within livejournal). Feel free to check it out at our blog (http://hab.la/blog) Basically you can chat with users to your website in any language, seamlessly, and for free.