Purpose for an “official” bridge translation mechanism

Purpose for an “official” bridge translation mechanism

I’ve seen elsewhere (I don’t remember where – maybe on the Brazilian forum) some discussion about bridge translations. Many of us (me too) are doing this kind of translation to help each other. It’s a useful tool, that I think should be “officialized” in Cucumis.

My purpose (open, of course, to your opinions):

Step 1: Everytime an user requests a translation, s/he would have an option to have his/her text translated by means of a bridge. There would be a note explaining that some not common language pairs are hard to find people who can understand both of them, so, after a certain amount of time (I think one week), the text would be submitted to bridging into English (or any other language which suits for, but then I can’t figure how to determine which language for each case). The user would be notified that bridging is the best way to have his/her text translated after a week, but his/her request would be charged 20% more (a 100 points text would become a 120 one).

Step 2: After a week, the text would be put for bridging. Bridge translations would be clearly marked as those, because the bridge translator would earn 1/3 of the points, in the exemple case, 40 points. The other 80 would pay the one who translate from the bridge to the destination language.

Note that a translation done on the first week directly from source language into the destination language would pay 100 points to the translation, without additional charge to the requester, as it happens nowadays.

What do you think?

Interesting, but seems it will add complexity to a sytem which is already complex.
I'd rather a system invisible for the requesters, that automatically submits an english bridge after a couple of weeks. Nobody would pay for it and the english translation would be normally rewarded.

But there is several things that anoy me. English experts have already many translations to evaluate everyday, so setting an automatic system that request an english translation will not improve this.
Moreover not all the request deserve to be translated, man sometime, the requester never comeback to check if something has been done.

So there must be a system that selects which kind of translations deserve to be "bridged".

That's what I had in mind according to the discussions we had several month ago. But this idea must grow. We must take the time to think about it before doing it because it's a quite heavy developement effort.

Hi JP & Goncin

I think some of the translations could be bridged in French (Spanish & Italian for example).

Maybe the bridging should be done in a "similar" language to the requested target language. By this I mean that if someone asks for a translation from Portuguese to Icelandic, it could be bridged in another nordic tongue). Latin languages could be grouped in the same manner.

I agree with JP that bridge translations should be covert and they should not imply a higher cost to requesters.

We need the same kind of "brainstorming" on this question as we had on the "not cucumis but..." thread, which was very useful in creating the slide show.

Bises
Tantine

D'accord, Ruth. I started this thread after an idea of mine, just to start a discussion.

You've got the reason when you said that the bridge language must be as close as possible from the destination language. V. g., Latin language has lots of gender issues ('mon chéri/ma chérie') that are unknown to English ('my darling').

OK what language should we group Greek with ? Or Albanian?

Using similar languages instead of english, sounds very complicated and I'm not sure it will be that much better than if we simply always use english as a language bridge.
I try to keep as simple as possible because new comers are lost most of the time.

Well, it was only a suggestion, and now I agree that it would be extremely complicated to use.

The "problem" with using only English for bridge translations is the burden of extra work that this creates for English experts.

I'll keep on thinking!!!

Bises
Tantine

well i dont know, it should be much simpler, only experts should be able to do that because frankly, if the translation lasts for a week, only experts pay attention and care enough to resolve it (im guessing), so the simplest thing to do is for them to request a new target language, only it doest get deducted from their accounts, and they can CC a favorite expert to get his or her attention.
the main problem i have been facing was finding members with both ends, who are not experts, there is no listing of members on cucumis :s why?

Yes, there is, go to "members", then "search", and you can select by country, all members are listed there.Even, just above "search", at memnbers, you got "members list" ...

I cannot find it Francky... :S There is no ´Search´ when I click on members, just who´s online and most active, admins, experts and richest member list.

Francky the list of members is not yet visible to experts (only admins). I have to change this.

Yep Tantine, I understand why you suggested this. I'm also concerned about the number of english translations to evaluate. All the difficulty of the process will be to select only the request that deserves it.

Maybe, as elmota suggests, I should build a free bridge procedure, that oly experts can use.

Later I can set an automatic system.