Just a side note here, it’s being found that due to its general comprehension level being much greater, ChatGPT translation outperforms google. I just tried it as a test with a paste from Flora iberica and it was better.
(I think where the language is one ChatGPT will have had few training texts in to acquire the language it may do not so well, but as a general rule I gather it does better.)
Most importantly, it’s pretty smart; I asked it,
“Wh at i sthree tim esfour” and it replied “Three times four is equal to twelve (3 x 4 = 12).”
What this means is that it may well be able to translate scanned OCR nature texts that are full of weird OCR errors that proves a disaster for something like google translate, I’ll have to see!
I think most of us know how to open “google translate” or another online languae translator so we can read comments that aren’t in a language we know. This works well, but on youTube you can just click a little link next to the comment and it will be translated. This is time-saving and having a similar function would facilitate the international communication that is obviously a part of this work.
I looked at old threads on this topic and found:
2019 https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/translation-option-for-comments/2891
2023 https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/enable-translation-of-comments/39024/24
Three years have passed and I wonder if there is an update? (I’m new here as of this summer and don’t know the history of these things)
I understand that is might be a resource issue. But, perhaps there are more efficient and fast ways to make this possible now? I wanted to express my enthusiasm for this kind of feature and find out if others share it.
(This is just an idea to save time, I don’t think comments should be automatically translated, I think it is best if we all write in the languages we feel best using, and translate when we need it. This isn’t a huge for me problem since the site is English dominated-- but it might be a larger problem for other users and then we will miss their contributions and insights when they take their observations, IDs and wit to other places. So it would make the site more effective and help with coverage of regions with fewer English speakers.)
As long as I use external tools for translation, it’s my responsibility to check that I got it right. Once there’s an official translate button, I’ll be at least partially relieved of that responsibility. I foresee that this will lead to a lot of contentious arguments rooted in misunderstandings that currently don’t exist because people do double check their translations.
I moved the above two comments to this existing feature request mentioned in the first since it is still open to keep all the conversation in one place.
I suspect anyone ready to argue will find something to argue about, whether iNat provides the translate button or some other site does. I imagine it’s common knowledge that translation buttons are sometimes imperfect and are provided by external services.
What I would suggest is that such a translate button if used for a single comment provides the translation service (ideally a reputable AI) with context by prefixing any item with the species and a little of what’s gone before, with separator symbols, then the item to be translated, and it can extract the item for translation using the separator symbols used.
However if it provides the whole stream of comments it could translate all the comments and the context would be there for the translator.