Machine translation

When I first started using Yahoo Pipes last year, I set up a Pipe to translate the RSS feed from Le Monde to give myself some practice with the service. It was easy to do, but the machine translation Yahoo offers often leaves a lot to be desired. Sometimes the headlines make sense, sometimes they don’t, and sometimes they’re inadvertently humorous or ironic. I think this headline from a few days ago is an example of that last case:

The white House lunatic any agreement on the departure of the American troops of Iraq

Facebook relies on user-generated translations

MySpace and Facebook are both trying to expand their markets outside of the English-speaking world. According to Tech Crunch, MySpace is doing this by creating local offices. However,

Facebook is taking a radically different approach—tapping users to do all the hard work for them. They are picking and choosing markets (Spanish was opened first, two weeks ago; today German and French were launched) and asking just a few users to test out their collaborative translation tool. Once the tool is perfected and enough content has been translated, Facebook will offer users the ability to quickly switch the language on the site, per their preference.

Like Google has done with image search and Wikipedia has done all along, sometimes it just makes sense to ask you users to do as much work as possible. As long as users go along with it, everyone is happy.

via Tech Crunch