Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: website
URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant:
Description of need:
Comments from users to identify species are regionally relevant, and generally in the local language, would there be a way to enable an automated translation?
Feature request details:
When a comment is not in the focal language, would it be possible to add access to an embedded translation system? The way it is done on other platforms for instance.
FWIW, my understanding is that implementing this is mostly a resource issue (I believe we would have to pay for this service, in addition adding it to our code), but it’s something I think the iNat team would like to do.
Also note some previous discussion here. It’s been on the radar for a while.
But you can do it now with your browser, just click right mb and choose “translate”.
It rather depends on the browser (I don’t have such option, but have to copy and paste into translator), and on mobile version there is even no possibiity to copy text from a comment - at least in my app it is not possible.
For now, using a web browser
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/translate/
Nice, I did not find it earlier!
Thank you @tiwane for the explanation, it would be amazing if possible, but I guess that’s the case of many features!
I agree that there are workarounds (which I currently use) but an embedded, in-line translator similar to what Facebook and Twitter have would be ideal.
Facebook translator is awful, not once it translated something so it’d become readable, is it possible to get something closer to google transator?
True, there are workarounds! The one embedded on FB or Twitter is not prefect, but it gives an idea, and we can use better tools that take a bit longer if we need a perfect translation @fffffffff
It depends very much which pair of languages you are working with. If English is one, the translations are better because there is lots of back to back translation available online for machine translation. South Africans battle with translations to or from Afrikaans as there is not much online. All the EU documentation makes European languages easier (not perfect, but workable)
If it bothers you enough, you can help Google Translate to correct its mistakes.
I agree that an embedded function for translating content would probably be useful for many users.
However, if this is implemented, please make it opt-in (click to translate this comment) or at least opt-out (users can disable the function).
It drives me crazy when I visit a website and I find that it has automatically translated itself without me asking it to (and sometimes without telling me it has done so). My computer and iNat settings are in German, but I want to see English content in English and even for other languages which I have limited knowledge of, I want to see what was originally written so I can decide myself whether to use a machine translation or not.
I use Chrome and can set - never translate German, always translate Portuguese etc.
I doubt we’d use Facebook’s actual translation software. I was referring to its implementation on the page more than the actual translations. FWIW, Twitter uses Google for its in-line translations, I think Facebook uses its own translation software.
I agree, if translations were considered, clicking to get the translation, and having the option to opt-out would be a requirement
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I’m pretty sure translations would have to be paid for, so I don’t see this being done automatically - they’d have to be manually requested by the user.
I see, so not much of a chance it happens in the short term ~ later then~
Perhaps an interim solution could be provided by a translate symbol that simply launches a tab of google translate with the text as parameter (.textContent can fetch the text), that can then be replaced whenever the good solution is arranged.
This could be a smart and “easy” fix!
There are extensions that can do this (I use one for Firefox) so I think it’s probably not worth the developer time for that interim solution (although I agree it would be cool).