Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Testing Translate Feature For Comments?
An anonymous reader writes "Facebook may be testing a translation feature that could overcome the language barrier many users experience on the social network. If a comment posted on a Page is in a language that is different than the one your Facebook account is set to, a Translate button may show up just below it beside the existing Like button. Clicking on the button will translate the comment to your account language. After translation, an Original button appears instead, and if you click that it will revert the comment to the original version (and presumably offer the Translation button again)."
all your base are belong to us
Bork bork bork bork, bork bork. Bork bork-bork, bork bork bork-bork.
- Bork.
The real question is can they translate all that "teen speak" my niece and nephew splash throughout their posts into something a dinosaur like me can understand?
OMFG, now i can unstand teh comments ty <3
This is going to be very interesting to see a new competitor for translate.google.com I think they could come up with an (almost-)completely heuristical translate engine given the massive amount of conversations going on in their databases.
It is happy and sounds like a very nice new features. I will add it until I can not wait to faceboox account.
I've always enjoyed languages and since I'm multi-lingual (not very unusual outside the USA) my FB pages are in a bunch of languages; some of which (like the posts in Swedish and Norwegian from my kayaking friends) I don't speak. But having them on my page means that with a little work I can decipher what they're saying. So now, since I'm a lazy person at heart, I'll just hit the "translate" button and get what will be only a general idea of what they were trying to say.
Oh well, like typing... and repair shops for televisions, typewriters and shoes... soon a thing of the past.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Isn't Facebook designed to talk to people you already know? Isn't it pretty much a given that you can already communicate with these people?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I'm Norwegian. 80% of the posts I see are in Norwegian. Yet I prefer to run Facebook in English. Unless I can configure this thing, 80% of the posts I see will have a needless translate button cluttering things up. Not the end of the world, but sure to annoy.
I work on Welsh-English machine translation, and have looked at doing this in the browser with a bookmarklet so that comments in Welsh can be read by non-Welsh speakers. The trouble is that people tend to use non-standard spelling etc in informal postings such as facebook, whereas the majority of parallel text available to train a statistical machine translation model tends to be formal language (government documents, press releases from business, etc).
Possibly this could be solved with two stages of translation, i.e. (Lang1 with informal spelling -> Lang1 with standard spelling -> Lang2). If this mapping is relatively straightforward (e.g. common spelling substitutions such as 'ough' -> 'u' or 'uff') then a statistical model might work quite well, if you could first split words into syllables with some rule-based algorithm.
Just a totally trivial, obvious thought about the application of statistical machine translation (sorry if I've pissed on some patent troll's livelihood, heh)
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
For polish speakers it will be great comedy...
Google+ has it - if you use Chrome and add the extension. It works well. At least, it turns stuff I do not understand into comprehensible content. I used it on some Chinese characters a little while ago and something I couldn't even identify yesterday. In both cases, it may noy have been perfect grammar but, it made sense and fitted in with the rest of the discussion.
As long as someone does not try and assert a patent here, this is good.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
r u - would you be so kind to let me know if you are
brb - I am terribly sorry for the interruption, but I must leave you for a moment to attend to the important business of flossing my cat
bf - gentleman caller
gf - imaginary friend
thx - thank you so much! I would be forever in your debt, but that would not be politically correct
rofl - your anachronistic babbling amuses me
rl - that rustic, charming place where you live
rtfm - I suggest you improve your intelligence before continuing this conversation
fyi - but I am sure you do not care for it
ftw - is a much better alternative that you would have thought of if you were younger
afaik - by saying this I do not wish to appear to actually know anything, as that would result in ostracism by my peers
That's the real test
When a machine can correctly translate valid English sentences like "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" into another human language (without handling the sentence as a special case), I will bow and grovel before it.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
That would be some interesting circular logic, if the original alternative-language versions of the websites were machine-translated
This cycle may be repeated n times, maybe in an attempt to find out after how many changes even the original version will be unintelligible.
4. ???
5. Like !
Is the title attempting to tell us something, or ask us something?
If it's supposed to be telling us, remove the question mark.
Facebook Testing Translate Feature For Comments.
If it's supposed to be asking us something, phrase it as a question. Don't write a statement and shove a question mark on the end.
Is Facebook Testing a Translate Feature For Comments?
You bring up an interesting point. That the general public will also begin to read AND finally two-way insta-translate comments / (maybe live chats?) with friends-of-friends a continent away under another language was not the goal of any website out there, even with Google's pool of world-changing projects.
Guess who benefits from pushing out a post or page that now can be read by the whole world without any google translator and toolbars? Facebook is geared towards the advertisers, and for presidents and celebrities like Queen Elizabeth, who have pages that are easy to find, but hard for Koreans to understand.
Businesses don't need FB to research on added quality of two-way conversations for their audience. Hence, the talk here about how the translations will stumble with "brb", "teh," and " ur " are of no matter because ads are one way, and proper "important people" pages have always been crafted carefully without those stumbling blocks by those who want as may eyeballs to read them as possible.
This feature is going to make Facebook even more annoying. I, like probably most people exposed to several languages rather read the original, which I fully understand than something fucked up by machine translation. If people are your "friends", you are likely to share their language(s) too, even if you have set your user interface language to something like english.
Usually the translations work on a comprehensible level between languages that are fairly similar, like between swedish and norwegian or UK and US english. When the languages share at least some similarities, like german, swedish and english, makes the result almost comprehensible. However, languages with no similarity, like english to finnish always produces just gibberish.
If you choose to auto-translate your site, at least make sure it's an optional opt-in feature and verify its results are working correctly by consulting an actual person who knows the languages. I'm pretty sure anyone who knows even a bit of english prefers english over something garbled by auto-translation, is localized poorly or has incomplete translation. Most software localizations are awful and is one of the reasons why I choose "US English" over my first language. Sometimes it's not even an option and counts as epic fail, especially if the translation is machine translation or outsourced to a third world country where the result is usually the same machine translation, making it a wasted effort. Using the same setting for country, language and other locale settings, like units and number formatting rules may also result in broken software. Always keep those separate.
If they would stop changing my settings of Most Recent to Top News every time i look away and of course fix the chat windows to something useful, then that would be fine - if i cant understand what my friends are posting, then its probably not for me anyway.
Knowing how other things got implemented, this is probably what will happen:
The service will be offered for some users, quickly followed by offering it to all users, whoever accepts are stuck with it and can do nothing to switch it off, and despite what they think all of a sudden EVERYBODY gets that feature.
There isn't much like the scent of a fresh harddisk
That's a real need.
It's a shame that in FB, there's no way to avoid that something I comment in a particular Wall, to be forwarded into another walls.
, specially my friends, without any way for the poster to avoid it.
Don't you think there should be an option like 'Avoid this message to be forwarded to any other Wall'?. This isn't that hard to accomplish, isn't it? The lack of such feature annoys a lot of people actually.
Google has been at the translation game for a long time now, and it's still a mess with a lot of languages. Asian languages especially. Korean, Japanese, Chinese all come out a jumbled mess.
This is on professional, proofread sources like news paper articles. Koreans have this abbreviation habit of taken their letter based language which forms jamos (2-4 letters put together) + + = (han) but when typing casually, they'll often toss out individual characters in some places as a common meaning for words. becomes thank you when the full word is . Not to mention their words often have their prepositions added as suffixes (which confuses the computer seeing it as one word), and spacing is more of a guideline than a rule.
Automatic translation is a waste of time. I've never seen it provide anything readable on Asian languages, except in the case of a very basic sentence that I entered myself. That said, European languages, aren't terrible. I've read a few google translated things from Denmark, or Norway that were reasonable, but I've also read stuff recently that wasn't that great too.
IMDB fucked up badly when they started translating movie titles randomly based on their perception of the location the browser is in.
I hate so much to be forced to log in to IMDB to cancel this shit that I simply do not go there anymore.
Another issue with asian languages, in particular Korean and Japanese, is that they are both very contextual languages. In both languages if the context makes the subject and/or object(s) clear, you can omit them. For instance if you were having a conversation about going to the store, you can just say "going". Now compare that with English(and Chinese for that matter), in English you pretty much have to(with a few exceptions) spell everything out. Almost all sentences require a subject, verb, and direct object(if the verb takes a direct object).
This contextual information makes machine translations of these languages particularly difficult because the computer has to be able to infer subjects and objects when they are omitted. Something that computers as of yet have not been very successful at.
Monstar L
Overall I'd say the results of machine translation are not bad at all, especially considering how different Chinese and English are.
Wow really? Who mods that a troll?
Do they deny that Google has been doing translation for a heck of a lot longer than Facebook has?
Do they deny that Asian languages are still a mess?
Kudos to Slashdot for stripping all the Korean characters out of the post though, really destroys the meaning of what I was writing.
I was recently playing around with some web based translators translating Spanish comments from some bilingual friends. They said "my spanish" was stilted and the English translations of their comments were barely understandable.
And beat them to it as well. The Google Translate Blog notes that G+ has had this ability from late August and has been at the crowdsourcing translations game a lot longer, and offers more languages.
I was chatting with a friend and splashed in some Spanish. All of a sudden, all the other content on the page turned into Spanish! It was bizarre!