LangPrism - web content crowdsourcing translation service

Hello, dear habrasoobschestvu!

I want to introduce you to our project on the popular translation of the Internet LangPrism . Crowdsourcing has long been confidently entering into all areas of human activity and the use of crowdsourcing for a field such as translation is not something particularly new, but we decided to look at this from a slightly different angle and want to present our point of view in the form of our project . Perhaps, he is already familiar to many from our translations here on Habré ( translation , translation , another translation ), but, nevertheless, I decided to publish a separate post to tell about it in more detail.

Under the cut, you will also learn about the new Habré in Japanese , do not miss it!

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Praeteritum

About two years ago, Microsoft ran an ITBonus loyalty program among its community, within which it encouraged various activities related to Microsoft products. Among them was the translation of technical articles and blogs on Microsoft technologies. Then I actively participated in this program and even a couple of times visited the first place in the rating. However, from the very beginning I was very upset by the inability to share my translation. There was no other way but to send the html file with the transfer to the mail to the organizers. Not to mention the fact that you also had to edit the translation manually using the Chrome developer tools.
Then an idea emerged, why not make such a service that will allow the translator to change its content right in the context of a web page, and other users to view this already translated content. Having a little developed this idea, it became clear that it is very similar to the concept of Wikipedia.

Big Idea

Our big idea is to combine the idea of ​​Wikipedia and Google Translate. Literally, you visit a website in a foreign language, use LangPrism, and if you have the opportunity to write an encyclopedia article on Wikipedia, then LangPrism allows you to contribute by translating a web page into another language. At the same time, your translation becomes instantly available to other users, which allows them to read foreign web publications in their native language.



This all works due to the LangPrism extension installed in the browser, which exists for all modern browsers: the native extension for Chrome and the bookmarklet extension for other browsers. When activating an extension, the following occurs:

• The content of the original page is sent to the server.
• The server returns fragments of this page that have already been translated by users.
• Finally, you get the translation user interface directly on the original page and you can translate by right-clicking on the sentences.

Once translated, a sentence on a site remains in the translation memory system and can be obtained from there with further queries. Thus, after some time the system itself will fulfill the role of a global translation memory, which can be used not only for translations of web content, but also in other areas, for example, when translating technical texts, instructions, etc.

Praesens

Now about 1,400 people use the LangPrism extension for Chrome , the number of registered users is about 420. Anonymous users also make a significant contribution to the translation, translating up to 100,000 words per month in total. The community chooses the sites for translation based on their preferences, the distribution of the amount of translated content across domains now looks like this:



In total, over 400,000 words were translated during the existence of the project, which is comparable in volume to two texts of War and Peace or five solid 300 page books. This is very good, given that the cycle of writing one book is about 1 year. One of the most popular sites that translates our community is the TechCrunch technology blog.



Today, the role of moderators in the system is performed by the users themselves and the simplest mechanism for dealing with spam. By analogy with Wikipedia, we made a post-moderated model of adding a translation, so that any of your translations immediately become available to other users. Now one of the directions of our work is the development of intellectual technology to counter the distortion of meaning in the translation, which will more accurately control the quality of the process of crowdsourcing translation.



Most recently, the service has a section called Translations, which includes the most popular foreign articles found on the Internet. It provides an opportunity for translators to translate relevant articles and allow other people to be aware of all the most interesting things that appear on the web. The section itself is designed like the currently popular aggregation services of interesting content. A sort of StumbleUpon in Russian. For the help in working out UX thanks, Chipsadesign .



The flip side of all visible translation work on web pages is the LangPrism community portal . It is a kind of social network for translators, which allows them to solve interaction issues during joint translation, to compile glossaries and agree on the style of translation. Each translator has a profile on the community portal. The portal provides a live feed that shows the most recent translations added by users, and a peculiar user rating of the community collected by the number of translated words.

Harry potter in russian

Now one of the most active areas of work of translators is the translation of the game based on the Harry Potter books Pottermore. Browser games turned out to be an excellent niche for applying LangPrism, since there is no other way to “pull” localized content on them if there is no official translation. Pottermore uses flash, but the main text is written in html, which makes it easy to translate. Translators have been involved in Pottermore translation before, only posting translations on specialized forums or VKontakte groups. To use it, you had to open two browser windows and match the source text with the translation in order to understand something. Now both the translators themselves, who have a handy tool for translation, and the simple players, who call what happened are called magic, are welcome. LangPrism users managed to translate Pottermore into Russian in three weeks, contributing more than 80,000 translated words.

Habr in Japanese

Not so long ago, translators from Japan became interested in service. Suddenly, they began to translate Habr into Japanese. You can try to use Japanese Habr right now. If this direction continues, we have a chance to soon broadcast to Japanese-browsers in their own language! Taishiro , Yukihiro thanks for contributing!

Futura

Future plans are to make LangPrism a peculiar standard for sharing multilingual information on the Internet, because already in different languages ​​there is created quite important and useful information that does not make sense to generate anew each time. It is enough just to lay informational, cultural bridges between different languages ​​and the total value accumulated throughout the world will be available to everyone. Just as Wikipedia once provided the tool that made it possible to take a copy of all the knowledge possessed by mankind, so we want to give the opportunity to convey this and many other information to each user on the Internet.

I would like to invite all habrayuzerov to participate in this project, and if everyone who reads this article will make at least one translation, will share his idea or other help, we have another step closer to this truly great goal.
Welcome to LangPrism .