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internetarchive / openlibrary

One webpage for every book ever published!
https://openlibrary.org
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Select and implement a continuous translation service #3328

Open tfmorris opened 4 years ago

tfmorris commented 4 years ago

Describe the problem that you'd like solved

There are a number of web-based crowdsourced translation services available which offer free translation to open source projects. We should evaluate the various alternatives, select one and set up OpenLibrary as a project on the platform to receive ongoing translations as the UI is changed.

Possibilities

Some possible candidates include:

Evaluation Criteria

Stakeholders

@mekarpeles

BrittanyBunk commented 4 years ago

I would say Google Translate is open source and to have people contribute there, but it seems that you want a company with translators to translate specific writing.

tfmorris commented 4 years ago

I would say Google Translate is open source and to have people contribute there, but it seems that you want a company with translators to translate specific writing.

Google Translate is a commercial Machine Translation (MT) service and most definitely not open source. We want a service powered by native speakers, not a MT service (although some of the human powered platforms use MT assist or first pass).

BrittanyBunk commented 4 years ago

@tfmorris I edit it all the time and there's a section where it feeds a person a line and they translate it. So it's not only by machine, but crowdsourced too. That's fine if it's not open source, but https://opennmt.net/ is the open source version of Google Translate (it's machine based though). Maybe there's a way to get volunteers in various languages too, idk.

ishank-dev commented 4 years ago

@tfmorris, Have you tried Yandex Translation APIs?
They are free to use if used through rapidAPI platform. But again if you are looking for human translation services then I don't think such services would be freely available.

milotype commented 2 years ago

If you're still considering using a translation platform – which I also strongly suggest! – I agree with the suggestions of @tfmorris. Weblate is also my first choice – and it is already used for Internet Archive – but somebody would need to check if it is possible to use it for the project openlibrary. And of course it would probably involve some programming issues …

P.S. I'm not a programmer. I'm a translator.