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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)."
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
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"'
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
This feature is going to make Facebook even more annoying.
I disagree. It may be imperfect, but I have friends that speak either German, Spanish or English. This feature will spare me the effort of saying the same thing three times.
Want.
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
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.
I presume you are trying to 'correct' my usage from "try and" to "try to".
Often try and is interchangeable with try to, but there are some contexts in which try and implies success.
I am quite content with my usage, Thank you for your suggestion.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.