Suggestions

I have used Cucumis for about a week now and I have half a dozen comments to make about the site:

1. The first page ( http://www.cucumis.org/ ) is really uncomfortable to use: the icons are small and I always waste a couple of seconds to click on the good icon (which doesn't change anything, since the interface in every language is pretty much the same).

IMHO the initial language choice should be made by HTTP Content Negotiation, thus bypassing the first page. If the user *really* wants to change the interface language (and he badly configured his browser) he should be able to do so on every page (e.g. with a pull-down menu).

2. The points system is suboptimal: languages with less native/fluent speakers should be more expensive in term of points than e.g. English. This could be accomplished by calculating the ratio between the translation requests into a language and the average performance (words/week or characters/week) of the people that could perform the translation (i.e. they know the source language and are fluent in the destination language).

3. Translations should be made from the source language only. Translations made using a third language as "bridge language" should be given less points, since the results will be worse than those of direct translation.

4. It really bothers me to check every single time "Yes, I am native speaker", "Yes, it's a good translation", etc.

5. The licence of the translated texts is not clear. It is not a problem at this time, since translation request are rarely more than a sentence, but it would be useful to give the translator (and the submitter) a choice of licence to release his text: I am thinking about public domain, the CC family (mostly CC-by or CC-by-sa, the CC-by-nc-sa is not compatible with GFDL), GFDL and others.

6. An interesting feature would be automatically importing Wikipedia pages for translation. Obviously people must reach consent about who must pay for Wikipedia translations (e.g. the 'en.wiki', 'fr.wiki', 'it.wiki' pseudo-user) and who will publish the article when it's done (IMHO every translated article should have a credit page and the article should be commited to Wikipedia by a user called Cucumis, who will insert also a link to the credit page in the wiki-discussion page of the article).

7. Automatically reading an external HTML page, splitting it into paragraphs and submitting to Cucumis would be also an awesome feature.

Hi and thanks for taking the time to make this interesting suggestions.

1. Yes, this page can be improved. I want to keep a generic homepage for the first time visitors. Nevertheless, for members, I could switch directly to the right browsing languaeg acording to first the brwoser browsing langauge and second the native langauge of the user.

2. Yes it could be like this. For now the ratio is calculated according to the number of letters needed on each language to say the same thing. What you propose is a kind of translation stock exchange system. I will think about it but that's not an easy one.

3. I think that's not very useful. Points are not so important in our contribution motivation. Most of us doesn't use the points they earn .

4. It doesnt appear anymore when your translations has been accepted. But without this warning we have so much moderation wiork taht I prefer to keep it. I will think abuot a way to get rid of this after you submited a couple of translations.

5. Interesting.

6. and 7. That's interesting too but who will pay the points for the translations submition? If we allow all wikipedia text to be translated on cucumis, the queue of translations to be done will be fulfilled with thos texts and we'll never end it.